Frankie Boyle is listing some of the things he hates. It is a long list. He hates television, despite his TV comedy career, and no longer has one at home. He loathes flying, and now refuses to travel by plane. He detests London and is delighted to be leaving after two years in the city. He is appalled by his native Glasgow, but loves it too, and can’t wait to move back.

Politics, religion, celebrity, mainstream culture, righton liberals – Boyle has bracing four-letter words for all of them. He is sick of performing too, but intends to remedy that by retiring soon. While most stand-ups are attention junkies, hungry for love, hooked on applause, the 36-year-old shock jock of British comedy seems faintly disgusted by it.

“I might be kidding myself, but I think I’m one of the few comics who doesn’t need the attention and doesn’t need the love,” Boyle shrugs. “I really feel I could stop tomorrow. I really feel I will stop within the next two years. But that puts you in a really strong position, because if you are going onstage and you really don’t need the validation, you can pretty much say anything.”

Boyle can at least muster warm words for Mock the Week, the topical BBC Two panel show that has made him a household name since it launched in 2005. The genial host Dara O’Briain calls Boyle the show’s “dark heart”, always prepared to out-gun his fellow contestants with savage and shocking one-liners.

“We all get on really well, there’s no rancour,” Boyle says. “But the actual recordings are brutally, horribly competitive. Really grim. People shouting at each other and stuff.”

Boyle’s TV and stage persona is that of a boggle-eyed, loud-suited, borderline sociopath, cackling like a Batman villain who has strayed into an Irvine Welsh novel by mistake. But the soft-spoken Boyle I meet in West London, barely recognisable in flat cap and civilian gear, is a very different animal. Literate and analytical, he talks glumly about the future of mankind and his two young children.

On his current marathon tour, unmuzzled by TV rules, Boyle’s ferociously bleak wit borders on the nihilistic. Even in our age of postPC comedy, with Ricky Gervais and Sarah Silverman artfully testing their liberal audience’s bad-taste limits, Boyle seems more remorselessly dark than his peers. His new live DVD is packed with scabrously funny routines about rape, incest, paedophilia and disability. But he makes no apology for grim subject matter, claiming to have received only one complaint in 12 years.

“People generally believe in free speech much more than newspapers tell us,” he shrugs. “I think sometimes people just don’t want a thing to be talked about because they feel uncomfortable about it. For example, people are a bit nippy about homosexual jokes, but those people are generally not gay. They’re straight, quite righton, and don’t know any gay people. And, I feel, don’t particularly want to.”

Boyle insists “gallows humour, soldier humour” has always been with us. The trick, he says, is smuggling taboo subjects inside an elegantly structured joke. “If it’s got a subtlety to it, they almost give you points for that,” he says.

Offensive humour, of course, can be cheap and lazy in the wrong hands. But Boyle makes it exhilarating and liberating. Proof, perhaps, of Freud’s theory that wit is a socially acceptable outlet for repressed sexual and aggressive desires.

“You do get a release, in a way,” Boyle nods. “If you’ve got rid of enough dogma to enjoy various different ideas without agreeing with them, that’s a release for you. A lot of people who are very dark in their work tend to be quite nice people, because they’ve got an outlet for it.”

In person, Boyle insists his fiercely misanthropic, pessimistic worldview is no act. He quotes the German film-maker Werner Herzog’s philosophy that the natural condition of the cosmos is “chaos, hostility and murder”.

This apocalyptic negativity does not always sit well with other comics. On a recent panel show, Meera Syal suggested that Boyle was clinically depressed. He replied that the world was doomed and her children were going to “burst into flames”. The awkward silence that followed was, he frowns, “very Alan Partridge”.

Born in Glasgow in 1972, Boyle comes from a working-class Catholic family. His father was a labourer, his mother a school dinner lady. After studying English at Brighton University, Boyle spent nine months working with mental health patients before starting to train as a teacher in Edinburgh. It was then that he first tried stand-up. It was more a drunken dare than a serious career move, but the club owner later tracked down the 23-year-old Boyle at college and invited him back.

Six months later, in October 1995, Boyle gave up teacher-training to concentrate on comedy. A year later, he won the open mike award at the Edinburgh Fringe. But he initially hoped stand-up would be a stepping stone to a backstage job penning jokes for other comics. Even now, he is a reluctant performer.

“I utterly hated it for the first eight years,” Boyle says. “But in the end I realised not liking it is actually part of what makes it good. It’s quite a Scottish performance thing, to really hate the work. Quite a few Scottish stand-ups would tell you they would happily never gig again, whereas no Irish stand-up would say that.”

Scotland’s savage, self-loathing, self-destructive culture is one of Boyle’s signature themes. One of the extras on his live DVD is a video diary of his Scottish tour in which his love-hate attitude to his homeland seethes through every punchline.

“It’s true,” Boyle nods. “I’ve found it hard not to live there the last couple of years but at the same time it’s kind of heartbreaking sometimes. We have taken a really wrong turn as a culture somewhere, we’ve attached our status to the wrong things, and been encouraged to as well.”

Citing Noam Chomsky and George Monbiot as influences, Boyle believes comedy is one of the last art-forms in which subversive, progressive ideas can be smuggled into the mainstream. But he also claims his political jokes are often edited out by TV producers, and his scathing routine on the War on Terror for a Scottish show was deliberately sabotaged.

“I’ll never be able to prove that, but they did,” he says. “It’s really instructive, when you’re on the other side, to see the stuff that won’t go on in telly. It’s not what you’d imagine, but there’s a definite set of rules. It’s like a polytechnic lecturer from the mid1990s, that sort of mentality. Slightly ill-informed, righton bollocks.”

A heavy drinker in his teens, Boyle claims his comedy career would probably not have happened without booze. By the age of 26, he realised he was an alcoholic. “I never really got to that wet-the-bed stage,” he says, “but probably, by the medical definition, I would have been an alcoholic.” Ten years ago, Boyle gave up booze and now he claims that work is his only addiction.

But not for much longer, it seems. If and when he gives up comedy, Boyle has plans for a novel and is already writing a comic strip. But his retirement date remains vague. He has, after all, already christened next year’s Edinburgh Fringe show. He smiles sweetly and says: “It’s going to be called I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face.”

Frankie Boyle is on tour now (see www.frankieboyle.com). Frankie Boyle Live is out on DVD on Nov 10 2008

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