I'VE just spent five minutes bitching to a colleague about Janeane Garofalo when the phone rings. It's Janeane Garofalo.
"Are you mad at me?" she asks. I tell her that I'm not, but really I am. Just a bit.
Call me Jonathan Ross, but my idea of a laid-back, chatty interview starts off with a few minor questions – the foreplay if you will – before getting to the inter
esting stuff.
The problem with Garofalo is that she's clearly in no mood for foreplay.
"What kind of a question is that? What do you want me to say?" she snaps back when asked if she's looking forward to her Fringe debut with a show that she won't say much about because "nothing translates worse than someone trying to be funny in print".
To be fair to the left-leaning US satirical comedian and film actress, it's 5am New York-time when our chat takes place and she's been up all night.
"I went to All Points West (New Jersey music and arts festival], where I just saw Elbow and Echo And The Bunnymen and did some stand-up," she explains. "But that's not why I'm awake. If I don't have to go to work in the morning I don't tend to go to sleep until five or six."
Garofalo has been a comic for around 20 years and in her acting career she has appeared in everything, from TV shows 24 and the West Wing to Hollywood movies including Reality Bites, The Truth About Cats And Dogs and Romy And Michele's High School Reunion.
She spent a year on Saturday Night Live and became good friends with Ben Stiller and Gary Shandling.
In the US, the diminutive 44-year-old is a household name who regularly appears on TV, but her last visit to the UK – at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk last month – was a disaster.
"I just sucked," she admits. "My stand-up doesn't tend to thrive during the day, in a tent. I don't know why (it went badly], it's just not an ideal setting for me.
"I thought the best thing to do was to leave," she says. "The audience were nice – it wasn't their fault. I was just unable to transcend my fear of daytime tent comedy."
She lasted less than ten minutes on stage at Latitude, but is looking to do better during her ten-show Fringe debut at Gilded Balloon Teviot. "I've heard all about the Fringe, it's a huge festival and many of my comedian friends have done it already," she says. "The only reason I haven't been there before is scheduling conflicts. I've wanted to do it for a long time."
The bespectacled star won't say much about what she has planned at the Fringe. "There's no over-arching theme or anything for my show. Certain things I talk about from night to night may change. Or they may not. I just don't know. It's not like I don't know what I'm going to say, but at the same time, I don't know if I will repeat myself all the time."
After a short silence, she says, "Actually, that doesn't sound right. Of course I will be repeating certain things, but the order of what I say is not written in stone. Or how I say it, and stuff like that."
With that all cleared up, she is asked how and when she decides what's going in her set. "I usually bring a notebook or an outline on stage with me, pieces of paper on what I would like to get to. And whether I do or not achieve everything on that list changes from night to night.
"Sometimes something will happen that day that I want to talk about or something will happen in the news or in the audience that will change certain things.
"Obviously there's anchor pieces that won't change – if you're doing an hour or more you can't wing it or anything – but I'm always hopeful that something new will occur so that each show is in some small way different for each audience."
Garofalo became famous - or infamous - for her outspoken views during the Bush administration, but she insists she's not a political stand-up.
"There is certainly political material – current events, things like that – to some degree on a nightly basis. But the amount of time I spend on political material varies from night to night.
"Political stuff is not a strictly segmented thing for me, because politics is the fabric of our lives in some way all the time. Sometimes I talk about it more, sometimes less."
From here on in, questions are met with what's best described as a frosty response from Garofalo. Maybe the lack of sleep has crept up on her, but it becomes apparent things are going downhill fast.
"What does the interviewer expect one to say?" she sighs after being asked to talk about some of her favourite movie roles, or what was it like working with this or that actor or director. "What reaction do you really expect to get from people?"
Time for bed, then, but not before Garofalo's called back to ask if I'm 'mad' at her because the interview didn't go well.
What does the interviewee expect one to say?
Janeane Garofalo, Gilded Balloon Teviot, 8.30pm, until 15 August, £12 (£11), 0131-622 6552
