Matt Crosby from Pappy's Fun Club

First things first, how did you manage to hook up with your mysterious benefactor Pappy?

It wasn't so much that we hooked up with him, he hooked up with us - he adopted us, looked after us and brought us up as his own. But it's quite a passive aggressive relationship, he's looked after us but he does force us to travel around the country performing these shows. He takes a lot more than he gives. It's got to the stage where it's Stockholm Syndrome now - we can't leave him, and I don't think he'd be without us either.

In these troubled economic times do you think the power of Funergy is the way to beat recession?

Well we were thinking about this because the reason we came up with Funergy in the first place was to combat climate change, which was the big problem about a year ago, but of course in the meantime people stopped worrying so much about the long-term ecological problems of the world and started thinking more about the short-term financial ones. So, possibly. I guess that's exactly what Pappy's Fun Club is - it's cheap fun. It's energy efficient and credit-crunch beating.

Were you a bit peeved missing out on the If.Comedy award, having got so close?

No, it was incredible, because literally nobody had heard of us, including the other nominees. No-one knew who we were. It really put us on the comedy map. We got a lot of great opportunities, immediately after the award. If we'd have won it I think the pressure might have almost been too great, I don't know if we could have dealt with it. We've only been doing this since 2004 and it was only since about 2006 we started doing it in front of people who weren't our families.

In 2006 we did a show, it was free and no-one paid any attention to it, it was just a fun hobby at that stage. Then in 2007 suddenly there were comedians we really liked in the audience enjoying it, TV producers, it was really exciting and scary. What's good about comedy is that you can go for years just getting good at it before anyone even notices who you are. But it happened quite quickly for us.

There's a bit of a theatrical background to the fun club members isn't there? What drew you to comedy rather than straight acting?

Well sort of. Tom and Ben had their own theatre company, we did lots of bits and bobs at university, but they'd always be very silly, very comic. When they were doing theatre shows they were always the comic side of theatrical, and now we do comedy shows, we do the theatrical side of comedy. The show's always got a story, we play different characters - it's not straight stand-up.

Also, if you come and see the show you'll realise none of us really had a huge career in acting. We're all good performers but there's never any point where people are going "hang on a sec, who's this guy suddenly appearing - I thought there were just four young blokes in this but apparently there's an elderly medieval minstrel as well." Everyone pretty much knows it's us. In a hat.

You've had a character named after you in Hollyoaks - were the rest of the Club jealous?

Yeah it's really exciting isn't it? I think he was only in six episodes, he was absolutely nothing like me - he was a trendy Northern record producer and that's not me in any way. It would have been horrible if it had been genuinely based on me and I didn't get the role, if I couldn't even play myself. My friend's been writing on Hollyoaks for a while now, I think the idea is that he wants to get as many of his friends on as he can. It'd be fantastic if the record producer shows up in a later episode and he's got Brendan, Ben and Tom with him.

What's the wittiest thing you've ever said, or heard?

I think the problem is that if any of us say anything that's genuinely clever we get so over-excited at ourselves that it stops being witty. If Stephen Fry says something witty he doesn't leap around like an idiot afterwards going "I just said something brilliant!" We're too dumb to be genuinely witty.

You've all performed as solo stand-ups. How much of a help is it having your friends on stage with you?

It's really useful, there's nothing more demoralising than travelling for three hours to do 20 minutes of stand-up where they absolutely hate you, and then having to go back - a hideous six-hour round trip to work just to be hated. But if there are three other guys with you then you can laugh about it on the way home. Plus, you get to mess around with each other on stage. Also, if someone shouts something out and I can't think of something the chances are that one of the other three will.

You've been on radio, done Edinburgh and even had your own TV show - which do you prefer, and what's next?

I think we just like new opportunities. The thing that we really enjoy about Edinburgh is that you have complete control over what you do, we have that space for an hour and we can just do what we like. What I enjoyed about writing the radio show and the telly show is that you're not restricted to what you can do on stage, especially with the radio show - you can open a door and you're in a room full of pterodactyls. We're willing to do whatever people want us to do really - if someone was to come along and say "do another radio show", we'd happily do that, and we're trying to get some more telly work too.

For more details about Pappy's Fun Club, visit: www.pappysfunclub.co.uk