What were the issues you were judging then?
"I was a member of Secondary Students Against Uranium. I went to demonstrations, Labor Party meetings, handed out [how to] vote cards. I'm probably not as radical as I was then. They say you lose it as you get older. I wasn't as disillusioned with politics as I am now."

What was fun about it then?
"You got to hang out with guys who had beards and played guitar. And women in cheesecloth dresses. It was Newcastle, the 1960s hadn't finished... I was the nerdy guy who helped garage bands set up. I was a roadie for several bands that never performed gigs. We all wanted to be Pink Floyd."

Were you conscious of your weight at school?
"Yeah. I was the fat kid. Not the fattest in class. I recently ran into the fattest in the class and now he's a slim surgeon. Son of a bitch... I was just an average kid. I was shithouse at sport, unfortunately."

Were you competitive then?
"No. Definitely not academically."

You are competitive now, though.
"It's a weakness of mine. The older I get, the more competitive I get. I think that's a fear of failure that creeps in."

Did you miss out on the competitiveness of sport?
"Yeah. I used to play rugby union, which to me was standing on the other side of the field praying they don't kick the ball to me. My dad was a sports legend - surf lifesaving, he represented Newcastle in hockey, rugby league. He swam for the air force in the Korean War. Very much a sports head."

How did you two get on then?
"Oh, he died when I was young. The thing about him was he was a frustrated stand-up comedian. He used to do acts in clubs, but he had a wife and two kids, so he was a travelling salesman."

What were you aspiring to?
"I was going to be a lawyer. But I got advice from a solicitor, Graham Malone, who is now a judge, to do a year of arts. That was it. I got hooked on student life; sharing households, home brew and growing weird plants in the backyard. It took over, I was doing kids' parties as [Morris the] clown to pay my way through uni. It was shithouse - for 40 bucks an hour your children can kick me - I was atrocious. I used to turn up, tell a couple of crude jokes to get the parents laughing, then paint the kids' faces. I wasn't as big then. But you know you are gaining weight when you start to feel your clown pants."

Did you smoke then?
"No. I took up smoking when I was 28, working in kitchens washing dishes. All the cooks smoked. At the end of the shift you'd have a couple of beers and a cigarette. Then the head chef told me to buy my own. It was the stupidest thing I did in my life. I suppose I'd give up smoking if you could masturbate in public."

Who were your heroes in 1978?
"Jack Lang. Lenny Bruce; I'd just seen Dustin Hoffman in the film 'Lenny'. Elvis Costello."

2000, aged 38.
Who are your heroes now?
"I was a big fan of Paul Keating. I don't really have any heroes."

Your mother died 10 years ago; your father nearly 20 years ago. Does it make a difference to your humour not having parents to answer to?
"Yeah, it does. It has crossed my mind that I probably would have censored myself had my parents been alive."

What do you do now to look after yourself?
"I used to swim about 1km a day back then and I used to bodysurf. I wasn't unfit. Now I'm forced to work out four times a week with a trainer. I don't like being this size."

Do you care what people say about you?
"I've never been good at coping with criticism."

Have you ever met anyone who you said bad things about on GNW?
"Yeah, John Howard and Peter Costello.

Isn't it hypocritical to glad-hand them?
"That was one of the things that first amazed me about politics. We had Jim Killen on the show and his mobile phone rang and it was Gough, and they were going out for a drink later. It is weird when you meet someone you slagged. The first time I met Bob Carr, I had slagged him quite severely on television the week before. He was a little testy but he is a Civil War buff, which I have an interest in, so that broke the ice... you just say, "G'day mate; how's it going? Yeah, last week I said you had a face like a half-sucked mango, nice to meet you."

As a fat person, you feel comfortable telling fat jokes. But does that mean you can tell jokes about other forms of the oppressed?
"No."

Do you feel like one of the oppressed?
"I laugh wholeheartedly at people who say that being overweight isn't any sort of burden apart from climbing stairs. Try being Aboriginal or gay in this country. That's hard."

Where is another time and place for you?
"I reckon Australia between the wars would have been interesting. I'd like to know how my grandparents lived. If there is anyone from Echuca who remembers William George Robins, give me a ring."

Comedian Mikey Robins is leaning on the bar at Catalina, a restaurant that is literally perched over a slice of Sydney harbour. It’s a toney place - a place aglow with reflected sunlight and beautiful people. But, despite his blokey media image, Robins blends right in. Indeed, the striking thing about Robins in the flesh - the unexpected thing - is how handsome he is. So much has been made of his weight. Yet up close, it’s his expressive liquid eyes, his unlined olive skin and his extravagant black hair that you see. That, and his taste for seriously expensive clothes.

Robins admits his sartorial streak sometimes gets the better of his wallet. "All my clothes are tailor-made. Everything. But then both my father and grandfather were huge dandies. People talk about my generation being vain but you can’t beat the vanity of the post-war Australian men. No matter how poor you were you had a Sunday suit. And I still associate doing well in life with having a nice suit."

The fat-equals-funny-equation is just one of the cliches that looms over robins profile. The other is what his wife and business manager Laura Williams recently called "the sad clown thing". Robins doesn’t seem like a man wrestling with psychic scars. But he did lose both his parents young. His dad, a travelling sales-man, died when he was barely 10. And his mother passed away before he made any real inroads into adult life.

Robins doesn’t shy away from the sadness - "I would love nothing more than to have talked to my father man-to-man" - but he’s impatient with journalists who want to perform amateur psychoanalyis on every passing comic.

"OK," he says. "Here’s something I really dread telling people. Here’s the real cliche. My father wanted to be a stand-up comedian himself. He used to tour with a record player and do what used to be called- and i emphasise that these were ideologically unsound times- a ‘spaz’ act. Essentially, he would mime to novelty albums in front of a microphone, which was actually the act that Jerry Lewis was doing before he met Dean Martin."

You can get Robins words down. But you have to be there to hear him hit the conversational notes. He speaks fast - so fast it can sound like a slur. He speaks, in essence, like a man who is always two thoughts ahead of himself.

Despite the rush, the delivery isn’t aggressive - it’s inclusive. When Robins cracks a one-liner he makes you feel like you had a hand in it. And that’s one of the secrets of his success- an exceptionally erudite and quick-witted man, he manages to make it seem effortless. He comes across like a bloke in a pub cracking jokes with his mates.

Which is really where he started out. One of the stars of the long-running, satirical, television news program, Good News Week, and a regular guest on Triple M, Robins began his career performing in an Elvis suit with he Castanet Club, a Newcastle act that included Steve Abbot (aka The Sandman). At 29, Robins was still washing dishes by day so he could write comedy sketches by night. The following year, he landed a gig on breakfast radio at Triple J, where he stayed for seven years and carved out his national fame.

A comedian who is at best bouncing off others, Robins has never been a solo performer professionally or ocially. He particularly likes to work with mates suck as Abbott or Tony Squires (a journalist and host of ABC’s The Fat). He has a metaphor that sums this penchant up. "it’s like there’s an RSL club and we’re all trying to get in. Ten of us charge the door and maybe four of us will get in. but then what you do is, you sneak around and open the window in the men’s toilets and let you’re mates in."

The Ten Men Charge theory has more than paid off for Robins and his friends, a number of whom have become media stars over the past five years. Robins himself is now in a position to laugh off rumours taht Triple M want him for Andrew Denton’s breakfast spot. He says no offer has been made but if it was he’d have to think about it. If he doesn’t wind up with the gig, it’s a move that will close a chapter for some ABC fans who were horrified when Good News Week moved to Channel Ten.

Robins says he can understand the backlash "on one level" because "it was a show with a strong sense of audience ownership". But he thinks for a moment, stops and puts his cutlery on the table. "OK. You’re standing in a pub and an intelligent successful person in their 40s comes up to you and says ‘I don’t watch the show anymore because I don’t watch commercial television’. The only other people you hear speaking the same tone are 14-year old girls who like ‘N SYNC but hate Backstreet Boys."

Robins remains passionate about the role and importance of the ABC but believes it is failing in one of it’s major duties- it’s not initiating young talent. "When I first started working at the ABC there were four of five programs coming out of the comedy department. Who are they taking a risk on now?" He lists a long line of bright young comics who have been nurtured as panellists on Good News Week but who aren’t being given opportunities by the ABC. He continues: "I think there’s a fear of failure at the ABC." Is it driven by the Howard government’s attacks on the institution? "Obviously, when you have a government like that, it makes everything harder." But Robin’s isn’t just critical of the ABC; he laments "the middle class intellectual laziness in all media that needs to be constantly resisted". I ask for an example and his answer comes so fast it collides with my question. "Dogs Head Bay."

Dogs Head Bay, he says, "was a classic show the ABC shouldn’t of done. Because they went for proven track records. They went David Williamson, McElroy, a good cast. You put that show down on paper and it look like a winner. But no one thought ‘Well hang on. we’ve just done Sea Change’. There wasn’t an artistic decision made. The death of any artistic endeavour is second guessing. And there’s a culture of second guessing creeping into the ABC".

Robins is even more disillusioned by the quality of much television criticism. While acknowledging there re critics out there doing creative work (he picks out Ruth Ritchie and Jon Casimir as exemplary) he believes television is too often reviewed by people "who actually hate the medium. They don’t understand why The Simpsons is an important show. in 100 years’ time, if you want to understand culture at the turn of the 20th century, you’re going to look at Seinfeld. You’re not going to look at the well produced BBC version of Anna Karenine."

So what is the point of television as a medium? How does is differ from other cultural forms? "Television s the marriage of art and furniture," says Robins. "Television can’t be reviewed like art. Think of it this way: it’s like the lounge talks to you for four hours a night. But we’re in the 21st century and we still have television critics who approach TV as if it’s repertory theatre."

Television may have become part of the lounge room but not all programming is as anodyne as some critics suggest. News and current affairs shows may be stuck in a rut but there’s still plenty of political and social commentary to be found in cartoons such as South Park and The Simpsons, and comedy shows from Good News Week to The Games. Indeed, it seems as if comedy has taken over where serious commentary left off.

Robins is sceptical about attributing too much political power to comedy. "Jokes don’t change people’s attitudes. To paraphrase Woody Allen, fascists don’t understand satire, fascists understand baseball bats." But he does believe in making his own views clear. "You’re not going to convert anyone. but at least some people out there who feel no one agrees with them can relax in the form of laughter and think ‘Thank Christ someone else agrees too’."

A voracious reader of history and politics, Robins has strong and coherent views on the direction of the broad Australian left. He sees race as a major issue but is optimistic about the future of reconciliation. "It was the over-reaction of the right that made it an issue in the first place. They actually put it on the agenda and I think, in the end, it will bounce back on them."

Globalisation is another topic Robins feels passionate about. While he acknowledges its inevitability, he argues the Howard government is failing to make globalisation to work for Australians. Robins has been prominently involved in the campaign to save the South Sydney Rabbitohs, a much-loved working class rugby eague team that was excluded from the National Rugby League competition after Rupert Murdoch bought in. "Souths is a perfect example of the need to find a middle way in a global economy," he says. "If you were an old-fashioned economic rationalist, you would be striving for arguments to exclude Souths from the NRL. But that actually bad business. What Murdoch and the rest are forgetting is that hearts and minds actually have economic value and if you ignore that, you have a shot-term business plan. You can’t have sporting teams without building a sense of community."

Politics matter a lot to Robins but if you want to see him come over really philosophical, it’s sport that will do it. He recalls a photo shoot where he and Denton (another South Sydney fan) were asked to go and kick a football round on Souths’ home ground. "I’m in the middle of the shoot thinking, ‘This sucks, this sucks’, and then suddenly I realised I’m in the middle of Redfern Oval. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. they guys who played here were my fathers heroes- they were my heroes’ heroes." He reflects on his last sentence and bursts out laughing. "Sorry, I feel the spirit of Les Murray has entered me and the buggers not even dead yet."

Some friends at a nearby table want his attention and Robins snaps out of reverie. It’s still early in the afternoon but they’re gearing up to party on. Robins, however, wants to get home to his wife. He might like sport and beer but he can’t understand men who want to get away from women. "Hey, I like women," he says, eyebrows raised for emphasis. "The only problem with women really is men." We’ve strayed a long way off the topic of comedy but then it occurs to me that it’s Robins ability to talk intelligently about a broad range of issues that goes to the heart of his improvisational talents. He makes a similar point when I ask him what makes someone funny.

"I have no theory of comedy," he says seriously. "If someone ever says they know what’s funny, they’re lying. it’s a crap shoot. The one piece of advice I’d give any comic coming up is you need the broadest range of general knowledge." He nominates Denton as a perfect example but pauses and adds. "But so is Mick Molloy. People think of Mick as being crude and Andrew as being brilliant. But they’re both very intelligent men and probably both as well-read as each other. The difference is in the delivery."