Meet the funniest man on the planet

Karl Pilkington stares balefully at my tape recorder. ‘How long have you got on it? Six hours! Bloody hell.’ The unexpected star of The Ricky Gervais Show is fretting about why The Spectator wants to interview him. ‘I don’t understand why I’m in it. I normally read magazines which do things in little bite-size bits, like, how they’re making cows with more muscle. Bits of info like that that might come in handy.

‘I like to learn stuff cos I didn’t do well at school. I think it’s better this way round cos when you’re a kid you want to play out on your bike.’

If Karl Pilkington did not exist, it would take a genius to invent him. Which is ironic, because this is precisely what some critics seem to think has happened.

The official version of his rise to something like fame is this: Pilkington was a producer at Xfm radio when he was chosen to work on a show with Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office, and his sidekick Stephen Merchant. In between pressing buttons, he opened his mouth and Gervais fell in love with the torrent of comedic drivel that poured out. Last year the threesome began a series of podcasts for download through the Guardian website. They entered the Guinness Book of Records for most downloaded podcast of all time (an accolade they joked was like winning ‘Best Invention’ for the wheel). The routines, which they insist are entirely spontaneous, revolve around the deadpan naivety of Pilkington as he relates his favourite facts and sayings — ‘you never see an old man eating a Twix’; ‘people who live in glass houses have to answer the door’ — to the delight of Gervais and Merchant, who mock him mercilessly.

His pronouncements on the world are, by any standard measurement, hopelessly misconceived — ‘gay people go out too late at the weekends’; ‘Chinese people age overnight’ — and yet it feels as though the deepest truths are lurking within them.