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Funny Short Jokes One Liners History

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There's something wrong with Sarah Millican. She looks different. I'm unnerved. "Where are your glasses?" I say, a little louder than is necessary. "Oh, they're in my bag," she says. "D'you want us to put them on? Do they make you feel more comfortable?" She bursts out laughing. She's sitting in a room in a Soho hotel, surrounded by coffee and breakfast pastries. "Can I have one?" I say. "Course you can, love, that's what they're there for."

Millican has established herself as one of Britain's most endearing comics, with routines about blowjobs, farting in enclosed spaces and husbands who walk out never to return. She doesn't do one-liners: she tells embarrassing stories, all based on her life, all recounted in high-pitched Geordie, and almost all of them garnished with below-the-belt naughtiness. She's the filthy girl next door you'd always hoped for: warm, open and engaging. Or so it seems.

Millican became a comic at 29 after her marriage broke down. She loved her husband and thought they were blissfully happy – until he left after eight years. She went back home to live with her parents in South Shields and something strange happened. While most of the time she felt distraught, sometimes she felt she could climb Everest on one leg. "There were days when I felt I could do anything. And on one of those days, I signed up for a workshop for people who had written but never performed." She'd been a film columnist for a local free paper and had a half-hour play performed in South Shields.

Within months, she was performing standup, telling strangers the traumatic story of her breakup – as she says, she lost a husband and gained an audience. It was a form of therapy: they laughed, told her he was a cock for leaving her, and she felt better. In 2008, she won the best newcomer award at the Edinburgh fringe for Sarah Millican's Not Nice, the show about her divorce. She became a regular on panel shows and earlier this year was given her own series on BBC2, The Sarah Millican Television Programme, in which she tells blue stories, interviews guests, talks to her father on Skype and analyses TV.

Has she always been filthy? "I think so. People say, 'When your parents come to see you, are they shocked?' But I'm like this all the time. I'm not slaggy, not promiscuous. I've always been quite a nice girl, but I've just got a dirty mind. I think you can be dirty with one bloke at a time. He he he!"

Humour runs in the family. Millican, 37, tells me her sister says the only difference between Sarah and the rest of them is that she gets paid for being funny. Was she always confident? In a way, she says. At home, her parents encouraged her, and she was always reading out poems or performing dances for them. School, though, was different. I ask her if she was popular and she looks at me as if I'm crackers. "Not really. Just very quiet. And bookish people who do their homework and get it in on time and it's good – they don't have friends at school. I never really got in the cliques. I didn't have the right shoes or hair. I desperately wanted to get into them, but never did, and I'm glad now because that's the kind of thing that makes you a comic. That little bit of resistance."

Was she bullied? "I was never punched. I think verbal abuse is potentially worse than being punched in the arm. I got called names every day. I got called Norma-No-Mates and Speccy-Four-Eyes." I tell her I prefer Norma-No-Mates. "You pick whichever of my horrible names you prefer, you shit!" Well Speccy-Four-Eyes isn't that personal, is it? "It is when there are only two of you in the year with glasses. Don't tell me what's hurtful when I'm seven. How do you know what's hurtful to me?" I'd meant it as a joke, but she's not taking it that way. "It's bullshit," she says. "I know what hurts."

Millican loved schoolwork, and had hoped to go to university, but it never worked out. Her father had a good job as an engineer in the mines, but the family were almost broken by the 1984-85 strike; at times they had to scour the beach for driftwood, and didn't have enough money for bus fares. Her dad went back to the mines, but they were never as comfortable. "My mam and dad could only afford for me to go if I stayed at home, and I knew part of university was to make beans on toast in a bedsit and have parties. My dad was working seven days a week and I didn't want to put any more pressure on him." So she went out to work instead, doing things she hated, filling out forms for people in the job centre, serving in shops.

Fast forward to today and there's a new DVD coming out and she's making a second series of the TV show. Her father, she says, loves guesting on the programme. "He got his teeth done just for the telly. He got them tidied up a bit. I didn't even get mine done." Will he be in the new series? "We've not made the decision yet. He's bought some shirts just in case."

Millican is now in a happy, long-term relationship with another comic. In fact, the relationship provides lots of material. For example, she often talks about how happy they are together because she lives in Manchester and he in Birmingham, so they never have to see each other. I ask her where she lives in Manchester, and this is when the interview turns weird.

"In the city centre," she says. Where in the centre, I ask. "I'm not going to tell you. You're not going to write it down." I'm just nosy, I say, it's not for public consumption. "Well, I'm not going to tell you because I don't know what you'll write down." There's a steeliness in her voice. All the fun has gone out of it. So I change the subject. Is it hard being in a relationship with another comic? "Ah, see, I don't really like talking about him. Are you going to print his name? I'd rather you didn't, but you're going to, aren't you?"

Well, I don't need to if you don't want me to, but it will seem strange, I say, because other interviews mention your boyfriend, and his Wikipedia entry has you down as an item. "That's because people I ask not to put his name in do put his name in, because you're not all that trustworthy." I think she means journalists in general, but either way, I guess, it's not a compliment. "Just because he's doing telly now, I don't want people to think he's doing well because of me."

Blimey. Why on earth would they think that? "When we started going out, we didn't tell anybody for months because I didn't want anybody to think he was writing my jokes. Cos he wasn't. I was doing it all myself." The more she talks, the more bewildered I am by all this paranoia. She offers me a deal: if I don't mention his name, we can talk generally about what it's like to go out with another comedian. Done.

Is it competitive? "No. It's just like having a funny friend. It's never competitive. It's like, would two people who work in shops come home and say, 'I sold more handbags than you'? No, they fuckin' wouldn't, because they get in from work and say, 'Oh, I'm so glad I've finished work. Let's put the telly on and get the tea going.'"

But it's not quite as simple as that, is it? Comedians largely rely on life experience for material – and if you're sharing that life, you have to decide how to divvy up the funny bits. "Ah, but he does all one-liners, his is all based on wordplay, so if anything funny happens between us, I get it. Ha ha ha ha!" Her voice is once again full of squeaky bonhomie as she acts out the scenario. "'You can't have it because it's not wordplay!' He's never told anything on stage that is based on his life."

Does she think she's like her dad? Yes, she says, and asks why. I tell her I once read an interview with him where he said: "I'm as easygoing as an old shoe, but when I explode the doors come off – and Sarah's the same." She says: "Probably. It takes quite a lot for me to get really mad. But when I do, I don't get shouty, but yeah ... "

Earlier this year, Millican made the news after asking a fan to stop filming at a gig. The fan wrote on Millican's Facebook page afterwards that she was "the lady videoing you in the front row, great show xxx". Millican responded by telling her that filming was an act of theft, and she wouldn't be welcome at future shows. Was that an example of her exploding? "People film all the time and it's annoying ... The way you say it is different from the way I meant it. I just said you're not really welcome to my shows any more, 'cos she was filming it, and she wasn't apologetic."

I say I was surprised by her reaction – after all, the fan stopped filming, then later sent her a lovely message. "But you weren't in the room," she says. "I'm very protective of my material. And you have to be, because it's very easy for people just to steal jokes. I think it's the lowest, absolutely the lowest ... " She trails off, but she's not finished. "Just because I'm on the telly, I can't say, 'Can you stop stealing my show, please?' I'm totally within my rights. And I do it nicely. It happens to every single comedian. Comics put mobile phones up their bums – I've seen this. They put them in pint glasses. I've seen comics smash the mobile phone they were filming with."

Really? "Yeah. And you know what I did? I asked a lady to stop recording. That's all I did. And I told her I didn't want her to come to my show – and that, compared to what other people have done at normal comedy gigs, is nothing. I think I dealt with it very well."

I'm astonished by the intensity of this attack and don't really know what to say. So I tell her my daughters are fans of hers and she looks delighted. The voice rises up a notch and once again she's warm, open, lovable Sarah Millican off the telly. She tells me how lucky she is. "I always think the trick is to find something you love doing and get somebody to pay you to do it. I always wanted to be able to say I pay my electricity bill by telling cock jokes." She pauses. "That's hilarious!" she says, more to herself than to me. "Then it just all got a little out of hand."

Thoroughly Modern Millican is out on DVD on 12 November. The Sarah Millican Television Programme returns to BBC this Christmas.