His work can be simply described as "observing people around me, seeing what makes them funny, and reproducing it in caricature", but Harry Enfield's life takes a bit longer: he is a middle-class kid who "let his parents down" by not becoming "a lawyer or something like that"; he's an "alternative" comedian who yearns for the same sort of audience that watches Noel's House Party; he's a self-confessed neurotic who has an addictive personality and is prone to panic attacks, and he's also a practising Catholic.
Instead of "snorting cocaine in a London media club" you'll find him on cycling trips in Oxfordshire. And you were wondering where all the characters come from?
After taking the year-before-last off to recover from the break-up of a long-term relationship, and seeing Paul Whitehouse's Fast Show winning plaudits for the kind of character/catch-phase comedy that he had previously excelled in himself, Harry Enfield is back on top form, pulling in massive ratings for his BBC1 . . . And Friends show, bringing out a successful book, a more successful video and cunningly plotting his future domination of the world.
He's still not happy, though: "It's just all this neurosis," he says. Like what? "I don't know, my head's too big, and my voice - I can't bear my voice, it's all nyer-nyer-nyer - it's awful. I put on weight easily, I smoke, I've an addictive personality so I can't do drugs because I know I'd love them. I worry. I hate that. I worry all the time - `what's the right thing? Did I do the right thing?' You name it, I question myself. People say: you've got a job, money, a lovely girlfriend, a house - what have you got to worry about? They're right, but I still worry," he says.
He used to worry about his family but that's all changed now: Harry Enfield is from haute bourgeoisie stock. His grandfather, who was knighted, and his grandmother, were on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set - "I would rather be dead in a field than have tea with the Enfields," reads an entry in Virginia Woolf's diary. His father, Edward, who's now a TV star in his own right thanks to his appearances on Oldie TV once complained that "my father appeared in Who's Who, my son is in the TV Times" and went on to lament the fact that Harry "wasted his education to become a vulgar comic".
Enfield Junior takes up the story: "I was sent to a Catholic boarding school which I hated, so I was moved to a state school near where we're from, in Sussex. That's when I started behaving like Kevin The Teenager (the character from his show who is having a particularly difficult adolescence). I used to hate my parents - the fact that they were square and middle-class and I had decided that I was working-class and punk. I used to sneak up to London to see gigs without telling them.
"I was so desperate to be working-class and I used to hate it when Dad would pick me up from a party. My parents did everything for me and all I did was grunt and raise my eyes to the ceiling every time they spoke."
So is Kevin The Teenager his apology? "Happily, it's all different now, I stopped behaving like Kevin. They actually love the show now and have their favourite characters. But I still put in things from my childhood: Modern Parent is partly based on my father," he says.
Given the range of characters on the show, from Tim-Nice-But-Dim to The Slobs, from the self-righteous Brothers to Lee and Lance, it's more than a bit surprising to find out that they're all based on real people, just as Kevin The Teenager was based on Enfield himself.
"I used to live in a council flat in Hackney and down the way there was a family of a big, fat mum, a tough-looking dad and five filthy but beautiful children. One day I came home to see the Dad presenting a Ford Cortina, which he had obviously `acquired', to his family. The kids were thrilled with it but the mum didn't like it because of the colour.
"`It's brown, I don't like brown,' she said. `What's wrong with brown, then?' he said. `It's brown, isn't it?' she said and this went on for about 10 minutes and became the inspiration for the first Wayne and Waynetta sketch, in which I actually used what they had said as the dialogue. It's the same with The Saucy Old Ladies - I used to be a milkman in the school holidays and would get invited in for coffee by quite a few old ladies who would frighten the living daylights out of me with their flirting.
"One 75 year-old woman said to me `I may be a mangy old cat but that doesn't mean I wouldn't lap up the cream. Way hey!' as I sped for the door, so I turned that into the `Young Man!' character."
The problem with coming up with such instantly memorable characters and catch-phrases is that Enfield gets besieged anywhere he goes with people throwing his lines back at him: "You'll never guess how much, and I don't really mind, except one time when I was on holidays and not in great form and this man said to me as I was walking near the beach: `you wouldn't wanna be going to the beach,' and I snapped back `and you don't wanna be the thousandth person to have said that,' which wasn't very nice of me.
"But sometimes you meet people who are exactly like the character you created - which is a bit unreal. I met this guy once who was just like the `Only Me!' character and he actually said to me `my wife tells me you dooo a character very similar to meeee' and I hadn't the heart to tell him. I just said you must be mistaken, you're nothing like `Only Me!' - except he was."
Strangely enough, Enfield started off in comedy thanks to a UK government grant which was intended to take people off the dole and encourage them to start up their own business. The government body, the Manpower Services Commission, didn't quite have the comedy business in mind but Enfield still got his money and went on to have early success with his Stavros and Loadsamoney characters.
"I was part of that whole new generation who didn't get into television via the Cambridge Footlights - and I suppose as part of that you feel slightly under pressure to be out all the time, hanging around the clubs, turning up at trendy parties and being fuelled by cocaine. But I'm a bit boring like that. When I toured, I'd be back in my hotel room at 10.30 p.m. watching television and eating something from room service," he says.
This, he stresses, has nothing to do with his Catholicism: "I think if you're born into Catholicism, you stray for a bit and get cross about it - well, I did - but it's still your religion. The Mass brought me back. I can go to church anywhere and have an international culture. I can go to Mass in Prague and at the sign of peace, I turn around and there's an old woman who's been through the Nazis and the Communists and she's looking me in the eyes saying `Peace be with you'. That's the only time I'm not a tourist in Prague, when she and I share a common culture."
Now 36, he has long since stopped worrying about being "hip". "I'm often accused of not being hip, but I'm not like Steve Coogan or The Fast Show or Vic and Bob, which are all quite Loaded shows. I want a family rather than a niche audience. I get more of a kick out of people saying `You were in our drawingroom last night, because you've got our kid or our mother exactly'. I want the same people who watch Gladiators or Noel's House Party - besides, you can't be hip when you're 36, and it's a bit sad if you think you can."
What now?
Harry Enfield's Christmas Special goes out on BBC1 on December 24th at 10.15 p.m.
A book, Harry Enfield And His Humorous Chums, has just been published by Penguin and a video, Harry Enfield Undressed, is also available.