"I suppose for a lot of comedians the internet is a bit of a dangerous thing – a black hole into which your time can vanish.

“Working at home you can start swinging from vine to vine looking for inspirational quotes and kidding yourself you’re doing research, before you realise a whole day has gone by and you’ve done nothing.

“I have to assume that most other successful comedians are more disciplined than I am.”

Comedy crossover

Formerly best known as one half of cult comedy duo Adam And Joe, Adam Buxton has carved himself a niche as an internet-savvy comic.

As host of BUG, the hit monthly music video celebration at the Southbank’s British Film Institute, he uses comment threads, memes and his own homemade clips to intersperse the music videos.

Kernal Panic, his first solo stand-up show where he isn’t hiding behind a character, features some of those ideas he developed at BUG, combined with a few new short pieces.

“I want people to be aware that there is a crossover,” he says from his Norwich home.

“I don’t want the audience to feel like they are being ripped off.

“If you have seen a Best Of BUG show this year you will have seen quite a bit of Kernal Panic. I would describe it as like a stupid TED lecture.”

He is very self-deprecating about his working methods.

“A lot of the time I don’t have a definite idea of what I want to do at any point,” he says. “It’s things that develop gradually, tiny ideas that are so slight they would be embarrassing to tell to any other human. It’s better for me to work through them and see if there’s anything valuable in them.”

That DIY aspect was what made Adam And Joe such a cult favourite – with their recreation of classic movies using toys a much-loved part of their Channel Four shows.

“A good day’s work used to be if I built a set, put up some lights and shot something,” he says. “Reading comments and transcribing notes, which is what I do now, doesn’t feel like work – it feels more like getting fatter and older and sitting in front of a computer while the world goes by outside...”

He is enjoying the experience of going onstage as himself, as opposed to his previous stand-up persona, the experimental animator Pavel. He says part of that increased confidence and connection with the audience comes from Adam And Joe’s cult radio show on BBC 6Music.

The long-time comedy partners recruited a Black Squadron of morning listeners, introduced Stephenage to the lexicon – the act of shouting “Stephen” in a crowded room to source the correct response “Just coming!” – and engaged in song battles over different subjects.

“It’s a totally different thing to doing a TV show,” he says. “We never used to know how the TV show was being received other than the occasional review or getting recognised in HMV.

“Now we are much more likely to get recognised. You get a much more personal relationship with someone through that medium.

“Most of the people who come to my shows I feel like I can go out and speak to them afterwards and have a good conversation, rather than thinking ‘These guys are a bit weird!’. When we were doing the TV show you didn’t necessarily feel like that about the people you met.”

There is another internet medium that he feels goes even further when it comes to that personal connection.

“With podcasting you feel like you’re getting into someone’s head,” he says. “I listen to a lot of US podcasts such as This American Life and WTF with Marc Maron.

“Podcasts are the best thing to come out of the internet – a whole new medium which is interesting and totally unlike any other. “You can still have as much power as a television or radio show, which cost a lot more, but it is totally democratic. It doesn’t take long for word to spread – I feel like the cream usually rises to the top because people are desperate to hear something good.”

He hopes to create another Adam And Joe podcast in the future with his regular comedy partner Joe Cornish, who is currently focused on movie-making having scored a hit with Brit sci-fi horror flick Attack The Block.

Trouble ahead

Buxton does see the ever-changing nature of the internet as causing problems for bigger media organisations.

“Things change so fast, everyone is struggling to catch up,” he says.

“If your primary goal is to make money and be a successful business then you’re going to be miserable. We are in a long period of flux, and it will still be going on in ten years’ time – they won’t have figured out how to make money off it because who knows which way it might go next?”

In some ways that’s why his own cottage industry take on the internet seems to work – using the ever-popular BUG as a base, which takes much of its content from sites such as YouTube.

The downside can be the instant reaction the internet provides – as he experienced when he took Kernel Panic to Edinburgh.

“You have the urge to scale up the reaction you get,” he says. “If you do a show and can see 20 positive responses and two negative, you always give the two negative ones more importance.

“If you tweet something, as it is not face-to-face, there can be all kinds of layers of meaning.

“When I was in Edinburgh I got a tweet that I found quite irritating, and was quite hurt by it – so I got in touch with the guy to ask what he meant. “It turned out he was disgruntled because he got a s*** seat and so sounded off in a way that seemed like quite a considered and thoughtful demolishing of my show when actually it wasn’t. He was a really nice guy!”

Social media has changed over the past five years, breaking down from MySpace’s music-sharing to the personal networking of Facebook to the constant 140-character updates of Twitter.

Buxton might have predicted where it could all go next.

“It will just be grunting – a social networking site called Grunt,” he says. “All you will be able to do on the site is one grunt, but you can do as many as you want in a day. “It will be understandable in any language as you won’t use words. There will be happy grunts, sexy grunts, naked grunts. “People will get sophisticated and everyone will follow them: ‘This guy is amazing at grunting. He crams so much meaning into one grunt – the whole pain of the world into one grunt’. “It will all happen...”