Russell Kane takes a gulp of his steaming onion soup and shifts a little restlessly in his seat. He's in the middle of a hundred and one different things and can barely sit still enough to eat.

“Two phone lines, four lives, it’s mega. Mega mega mega,” says the award-winning stand-up comic.

It’s impossible not to feel invigorated by the energy he emanates – he talks passionately at breakneck speed about everything from his new Edinburgh show to the grammar school system.

“I’ve got bags of the stuff, I can never get it out. And since I started stand-up, it’s like an exfoliation, an expulsion – it all comes out every night.”

Today, he’s talking about the fruition of one of his keenest passions – writing. His first novel, the Humorist, is out now, and for Kane, it’s been a long time coming.

“I started writing it about four years ago,” the 31-year-old from Southend admits. “I’m a morning writer. I won’t write anything after 1pm. I started getting up at 9am and writing for three or four hours, then doing stand-up in the evening.”

He’s already written three other novels, which he describes as “70,000-word training exercises” that he’s been doing since he was 16, plus a collection of short stories he’d like to rework. But he’s keen to see how this one does.

“I don’t think people will expect me to write a book like this,” he says. “They’ll be expecting a hilarious romp with lots of pratfalls: ‘170 pages of laughs!’ Not a dark, twisted, ‘literary’ novel. It’ll be interesting to see what the public makes of it.”

The Humorist is narrated by comedy critic Benjamin White, who has a genius insight into his subject but can’t laugh. It opens with a scene of mass destruction in a comedy club – Benjamin has taken to the stage and killed his audience with the funniest joke in the world. The rest of the book delves into his background, growing up as an outsider in a family of laughers, and recounts the events that led up to that moment.

“I’d always wanted to write – it long pre-dated comedy,” says Kane.“Comedy was just something I did as a hobby after work.

“But once I started, I was like, ‘Right I want to win the Perrier Comedy Award’.”

The idea for his novel began with the opening scene.

There was already a Monty Python ‘killer joke’ sketch, in which the joke is translated into German in a form the British troops couldn’t understand, so that it only kills their enemies.

“I took that as a challenge,” says Kane.”

Writing a novel is a natural extension for Kane, who studied literature at Middlesex. The first of his family and friends to go to university, he enjoyed being close to home and “smashing the two worlds together”.

He grew up in a bookless house and says his degree was a reaction to that. “I went from age five to 18 without anyone telling me literature had any value whatsoever.”

Now he’s passionate about the debate surrounding grammar schools and equality of education.

“It’s utterly unforgiveable that if people fail the 11-plus they get dumped in a sub-standard school.

“The correct response is to fix the schools for the people who failed, not to take away the opportunity for bright, working-class kids to experience social mobility from passing the 11-plus.”

Since winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2010, Kane’s undergone something of a make-over, which coincided with splitting from his comedienne wife, Sadie Hasler. He now regularly sports a blond quiff and eye-liner and dated model Charlotte Austin, until they too split.

He says his new look is a “slightly feminised masculinity, the comfortable place for me on the spectrum. I’m heterosexual, but living next to the border of gay and straight.”

As well as the book, there are two new TV shows for BBC Three and his new hour-long comedy show for this year’s Edinburgh Festival, which has the working title Posturing Delivery. “It’s a male voice analysing what it might be like if I don’t have kids, because we don’t hear that viewpoint. The feminine discourse is regurgitated in chicklit and magazines, but how can men talk about that fear?”

He has a five-month-old pug called Colin, but it’s a real-life baby Kane’s desperate for.

He considered adopting with his ex-wife and would even think about surrogacy.

“I think the previous generation of men think that just getting an egg to become a zygote constitutes fatherhood, whereas I think it’s more about going down to school and playing with them. I am so sick of falling in love and it going wrong. I have considered going to America, slapping £20,000 on the table, finding a surrogate and coming back with my sprog,” he says.