There is nothing in Tim Key's background - beyond a father with a penchant for amateur operatics - that explains his coronation as Britain's new king of comedy. When we meet it is less than 48 hours since he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for his Fringe show, The Slutcracker, and he is understandably elated and exhausted in equal measure.
In a profession that is long on gongs and short on ready cash, the Eddies are still routinely referred to as the comedy "Oscars". The £8,000 which Key pocketed with the award is very welcome. He also gets to perform at the Toronto and Montreal comedy festivals.
Key is an accidental comedian. His emergence as a comic talent has come via a tangential route involving a stint in the Ukraine, a degree in Russian and an audition with the Cambridge Footlights.
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It's hard to explain what he does but adjectives used to describe his work include "oddball", "whimsical", "low-key", "Dadaist" and "on the fringe of lunacy". Part Spike Milligan, part McGonagall, he describes himself as "a poet, performer and savant".
For the past month he has been performing two shows a day, Slutcracker and a Tom Basden play, Party, which won a Fringe First award. "It's been a peculiar mixture of being really happy and then physically absolutely and completely broken," he says.
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Slutcracker is a follow-up to his previous fringe show, The Slut in the Hut. Key has been coming to the Fringe since 2001, when the sketch show he was in won the best newcomer prize.
At the heart of Slutcracker is very banal poetry interspersed with exquisitely shot silent films and lists of things - most notably, animals that Key would fit inside. There is plenty of interaction and at one point he uses members of the audience to traverse the stage without touching the floor.
"At its essence it is quite a shambolic poetry show," Key says. "I made a slight shift in my approach this year. I've made it less disarming and a bit more polished and charming. I wear a snappy suit. I'm slightly more in control of what I'm doing and there is a bit more direction."
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It has paid off. A diffident man, Key now joins the list of luminaries who have won the Eddies, formerly known as the Perrier Awards, including Frank Skinner, Sean Hughes, Lee Evans and Jenny Eclair.
"When I heard I'd been nominated I phoned my brother," he says. "I got through to his answer machine and just broke down. After that it was very surreal. My phone went mad with calls and texts. For me it's just amazing to be aligned with that group of winners."
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Key was brought up in Cambridge where his father was an engineer and his mother a school learning-support assistant. Beyond being press-ganged to perform in the Gang Show, he had no theatrical leanings. What kind of child was he?
"Pretty much the basic model," he says. "I did my football. I did a Gang Show. I must have liked it because I took drama at GCSE. I don't know why I did that. My dad did Gilbert and Sullivan - lots of it - but there's nothing too majorly theatrical in my family." A trip to the Ukraine in his gap year - "I was disorganised; when I applied there was nothing else left" - led him to study Russian at Sheffield University where he did some drama.
Back in Cambridge he fell in with the Footlights, performed in a pantomime and made enough contacts to take him to the Fringe and get an agent.
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Key has enjoyed modest success on the radio and television. His first solo show at the Fringe, Luke & Stella, was commissioned by Radio 4 as All Bar Luke. There was also the sketch show Cowards, a slot on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better and the irreverent celebrity quiz We Need Answers. In between there have been fallow periods, some of which have been spent working in Hamleys toy shop.
The thing that strikes you about Key apart from his vagueness is his politeness. Unlike most comedians of his age - he was 33 last week - he doesn't pepper his conversation with expletives. I ask about the dispute over the censorship of comedians in the wake of the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross fracas.
"I don't come that close to the boundaries," he says. "On a show like Cowards there is a bit of overseeing how many swear words we use. I wrote one sketch where I brazenly used the c-word for the name of a character. We did it live and it went down very well. It went quite far up the chain of command before somebody said, 'No, I don't think you can use that because you are basically just saying the c-word'."
The poetry of Key occasionally borders on the offensive, including a piece about the Queen. "Phil kissed Liz / And made her feel weird / Because the saliva fell on her fillings / And it fizzed / And because he clutched her arse / While he kissed her / And because it hadn't happened for a while / And, principally, she was the Queen."
Key protests: "It's not offensive. It's just about her kissing, so it's quite a human thing. I guess she kisses." It would, however, be a mistake to confuse his vagueness with half-heartedness. Key is serious about his work. He writes screeds of sketches and poems and then rejects 90 per cent of them. However shambolic the show seems, it is crafted and honed. Before he went on stage, Key went through the same ritual.
"I'd prepare maniacally for my show from 6pm," he says. "I'd cook and eat fish. I ate fish every day of the festival. My festival seemed to be going well, so I felt I had to keep doing it. Then I'd watch Dragons' Den and have a bath. At 8.10pm I'd walk the same route to the Pleasance and go to Scotmid, where I'd buy four bottles of Kronenburg, one tomato, a coconut sponge and a bottle of Lucozade."
Key is a comedian for the internet age. His eclectic mix of the trite, the pretentious and the humorous mirrors the random nature of the web, uniting the beautiful, the barmy and the banal. That it works at all, let alone well enough to win the Eddie, is due to the whimsical charm of Key. It really is the way he tells 'em.