Matthew Jenkin talks to stand-up comedian Jenny Eclair about being funny at 50 and growing more furious with age.

HER name may sound like a delicious French pastry, but nobody would dare eat Jenny Eclair for breakfast — the certified grumpy old woman is as brash as she is brilliantly funny.

“I had an eating disorder so I was very thin with a perm and a slightly fake Mancunian accent,” Jenny says about her time starting out as a punk poet in the late 1970s.

“I did poems about my tits. It was sort of girl punk.”

Having moved on from lovingly ripping off the iconic John Cooper Clarke, Jenny soon gained a reputation as somewhat of a firebrand, with her bold, foul-mouthed stand-up routines.

Her humour may not be to everyone’s tastes, but then she doesn’t see why comedy should be.

She said: “I’m not a big fan of comedy with a very broad appeal.

“What makes most comedians is that misfit mentality and not going with the crowd.

“Sometimes that does make you slightly unappetising.”

After returning from the Edinburgh Fringe — where she was crowned the first woman to win the prestigious Perrier Award — fans will be able to taste her delicious humour for themselves at next month’s Greenwich Comedy Festival.

Jenny is hoping her act, which will preceed her upcoming Old Dogs, New Tricks tour, will go down better than one of her early gigs at The Tunnel Club in Greenwich where she was hummed off stage.

“Audiences have a way of telling you to piss off,” Jenny says.

“I do still have bad gigs and the trouble with writing stand-up is it’s very difficult to rehearse it anywhere.

“It’s only when you’re on stage you realise some of it wasn’t quite as funny as you thought it was.”

While some people find themselves mellowing with age, growing older has only added fuel to Jenny’s insatiable rage.

She said: “I am much more furious as a person and bad-tempered and jealous.

“I’m 50 years old and there's a third wave of comics who have come up behind me now.

“I am much more anxious about status and I am terribly neurotic about that sort of thing.”

However, she says it’s something she’s got used to and admits to being a fan of a lot of young comedians.

She said: “There’s some great comedy about and I hope I’m not one of those old git comics which only likes they’re own generation and thinks anything on television post 1992 is crap.

“Programmes like The IT Crowd literally have me snorting on the floor. and I do keep my eye on people coming through.”

Jenny Eclair. The Greenwich Comedy Festival. Old Royal Naval College. September 11. To book tickets and for the full line-up of acts, visit greenwichcomedyfestival.co.uk