Beyond debate, this has been the year that’s seen Frankie Boyle installed as the comic laureate of broken Britain — or at any rate the Britain that finds abortion, paedophilia, bulimics and the disabled funny.

It’s curious to realise it, but the 36-year-old Glaswegian is the first Scottish stand-up since Billy Connolly to make any sort of dent upon the wider British audience. Until Boyle, there have been few from here with the capacity to replicate the Big Yin’s broad appeal. Connolly has cast a shadow three decades long.

But times change. Look at a Boyle audience today and probably to the bulk of them Connolly is no more than a pensioner with a purple beard, a tame, back-slapping adjunct of Parky and Tarby. Connolly’s comic universe was a sepia-toned realm of shipyards, tenements and bike-shed innuendo. Boyle, on the other hand, gives us news we can use, suggesting with a certain joyful malice the keys that will unlock the cant and doublethink of our mediated modern landscapes. The spice in his act lies in sifting the horrible truths from the childish morbidity. To paraphrase the humorist PJ O’Rourke, many people share Boyle’s world view, especially after a few drinks.

The dividend for Boyle has been acceptance into a gilded academy of comics who, like Ricky Gervais, Paul Merton, Ross Noble and Jack Dee, leave behind the club circuit for television panel shows, theatre tours and live DVDs released for Christmas.

He has just concluded his first large national tour, a three-month odyssey through the heartland of middle England, from Carlisle to Leamington Spa: “Sometimes I sit in the dressing room before a show thinking someone in the next room is watching a football match really loudly,” he says. “They aren’t — it’s just the noise 2,000 people make filing into the hall.”

The jump-lead for Boyle’s career has been a regular slot on the BBC2 panel show Mock the Week, an ideal forum for his two-fisted take on current affairs. Before that, though, was a 12-year clamber up the comedy pole, much of it spent within the thankless corridors of BBC Scotland, peddlers of what Boyle dubs the “the gonny-no-flush-my-budgie-doon-the-cludgie school of comedy”.

He recalls one producer there asking him to remove a joke about former first minister Henry McLeish because his wife “quite liked” him: “When I was doing BBC Scotland shows I’d have to write two scripts a week so I’d have one in reserve when they threw the first script in the bin.”

For all the national recognition this year has brought, though, Boyle seems sanguine. He has a steely certainty about his comic abilities and, thanks to an early brush with teacher-training, an innate confidence in front of crowds. Uncommonly for a stand-up, he can live without audience affection. In conversation he is as sad and thoughtful as his stage persona is harsh and hard. You get the sense that comedy is a rather academic subject to Boyle, a science to be perfected rather than the conduit between himself and a public.

Performing was a means to an end initially, a way of demonstrating he could create material to compete with Connolly and Jerry Seinfeld. He anticipates the day he can retire from the stage and devote himself solely to writing.

“You hear sculptors argue that, to them, the statue is inside the block of marble and they just have to get rid of the waste material,” he says. “It’s the same for me with jokes. Someone attacks Glasgow airport and I think to myself, there will be five definitively funny jokes within that event and I won’t rest till they come out. The worst feeling is when you don’t have The Joke on something, you just have A Joke.”

By his own admission “the blackest man in showbusiness”, Boyle flirts with sickness for its own sake.“Why do so many paedophiles have beards and glasses?” goes one routine. “What is it about that look children find so sexy?” His stand-up show is a charnel house of contemporary dysfunction, from sexual issues (“Viagra takes half-an-hour to have any effect; I often find in that time the woman has managed to wriggle free”) and gay adoption (“great idea — the dads already know where all the best parks are”), to terrorism and Michael Jackson, performed in front of audiences he believes resemble “a holding pen for the Jeremy Kyle show”.

There’s little light relief in a Boyle show, just the rather bleak sense that outside, the world is morphing into one huge Daily Mail headline. You could see him as a kind of Roy Chubby Brown for people who’ve been through further education.

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