Paul Kaye, the comedian, ex-punk and scourge of celebrities, was parking at Tesco the other day when his wife, opening the car door, barely nudged the neighbouring 4x4. Its owner went ballistic. Kaye bore the tirade, feeling increasingly like abusing the woman right back – her car wasn’t even marked. Instead, he silenced her by taking his car key from his pocket and, with a flourish, scratching it right down his own car.

There, he said. Quits. That says a lot about the man. Kaye is a devoted dad with two sons aged 16 and 5, but also one of Britain’s most uncompromising character comedians. He may not have the fame of Sacha Baron-Cohen or Steve Coogan, but you get the impression he’s happy being a bit of a cult.

We first met ten years ago, in Cannes, where he was filming what would be the swansong of his most famous alter-ego, Dennis Pennis. Pennis, you may recall, accosted celebrities on the red carpet with ego-pricking questions. That night, he arrived for dinner like a flame-haired, blue-eyed tornado, buzzing at having broken through security to reach Michael Jackson. “Do you like the rap group 3T,” he just had time to ask before the superstar’s bouncers bundled him away, “or do you prefer Boyz II Men?” [Say it out loud . . .]

“That was a mental time,” Kaye recalls now of the character he conceived as a cross between Woody Allen and Johnny Rotten. “And scary. One time I got trapped in this revolving door, with security guards on both sides – and they were nasty, you know, I’d spent a lot of time winding them up! It was an incredible amount of work, often for nothing. I remember following Barry Manilow from city to city, carrying this big white bedsheet; it took months before we finally caught up with him. Why the bedsheet? So I could say to him, ‘Here, Barry, you dropped your handkerchief!’ ”

So Kaye killed off Dennis Pennis, only to see Ali G, the celebrity-bait-ing alter-ego launched by Sacha Baron-Cohen a year later, climb to global success. Baron-Cohen even took on Kaye’s co-writer, Ant Hines, who got an Oscar nomination for the Borat film. Was Kaye envious? “A little. But then it takes a kind of dedication and ambition to get that kind of success, and I didn’t have it.”

Kaye grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in North London, but his life was transformed by punk. A fanatical admirer of Sid Vicious, Kaye was born with a broken arm – common in a twin – and has since broken every bone in his body. While sharing a flat with John Glazer (who would later direct Sexy Beast), Kaye was challenged to jump from an upstairs window into a street bin. He broke an arm. Two weeks later, his arm still in plaster, they double-dared him. This time he broke a leg.

His favourite party trick was running full-tilt into a lamp-post – though, he reveals, he would cheat a little by striking the metal with his ring to exaggerate the impact. Oh, and he once accidentally dropped a match into his turn-ups, in the days when smoking was still allowed on buses. His trousers caught fire, filling the upper deck with hot black flecks, and he had to rip them off.

Does this sound like a man who’d have a career master-plan? “I don’t hustle,” he confirms happily. “I don’t schmooze. I left a film I wrote on the shelf for two years but my friend decided to hawk it around – it now has Clive Barker and Guillermo del Toro attached. Work comes and goes, and I think people will find you.”

So far, that includes starring in two feature films – Blackball, a misfiring comedy about bowls, and It’s All Gone Pete Tong, in which Kaye is astonishingly good in the straight role of an Ibiza DJ who is going deaf. He’s also taken a smaller part in Malice in Wonderland, out next year, as a drug-dealing update on the hookah-smoking caterpillar.

But the character that has put him back to the top of every teen’s hero-list, at the ripe old age of 43, is Mike Strutter, total nutter. Strutter is so un-PC that he scares even Kaye. He seems almost relieved that MTV has not commissioned a new series – though Kaye now takes Strutter on stage with a punk band, recently supporting the New York Dolls and gobbing on Jarvis Cocker’s head. “Strutter was like my psychic bin, he just brings out all the really horrible parts of me. It f***ed me up, actually, for weeks after filming.”

Lacking formal training, Kaye applies a competitiveness and physicality to his performances that he links to his school years as a sprinting champion. He ran 100 metres in 11.4 seconds at the age of 15, and dreamt of getting into The Guinness Book of Records. This year he finally cracked it – beating South Park for most profanities in a TV show. “I just have to push it to a limit where I think, no one could get near that. One time, as Strutter, I was swinging around so much I vomited. I carried on, in character, right through it! I was so proud of myself . . . it’s really quite tragic!”

So it may surprise fans to learn that his new role, starting this week on Cartoon Network, is in a kids’ kung-fu series made by Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace and Gromit. Has fatherhood mellowed him? Fat chance. The evil piranha Dr Wasabi is his most deliciously crazed creation yet, voiced with a camp German accent and a demented cackle that rivals Heath Ledger’s Joker. “I loved it, I’d come out of the sound booth aching and drenched in sweat. I really hurt myself one day – for a voiceover! I was giving out these Nuremberg-style rants, and I f***ed my shoulder up so badly.”

Yes, Kaye is right at the top of his game. So naturally, there’s every chance he’ll pack it all in. His mother died at Christmas, and there’s a “definite possibility” that next year he’ll move back to Israel. This is where he and his wife Orly met aged 18, where she later spent many years estranged from him, and where her mother was, shockingly, killed recently by a Palestinian missile shortly before her 70th birthday. Today Kaye is wearing the jewellery his mother-in-law made – a single blue earring, and several pendants and necklaces.

“It’s been a right old rollercoaster,” he says, “spending nine years apart, then getting back together . . . keeping that going is so much more important than work. So if that happens, it happens. There’s no path or plan.”

Old punks, it seems, never die. But if fate dictates, they sometimes become paranoid psychotic German cartoon piranhas.

Chop Socky Chooks starts on Cartoon Network on Monday September 8 2008

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