MAEVE Higgins walks in to a hotel bar in Dublin, soaked from the spurting rain and removes her jacket and bag. Her humour immediately surfaces, throwing gags into light conversation, deadpan and delivered from somewhere beyond left field. She's joking with the photographer about a stint of work experience in a newspaper in Cork (she studied photography in college), and her guilt at not sending them a thank-you card, "I was going to pretend I was dead or something."

One on one, she's more sedate. She says she doesn't go out much, because it feels too much like work. "I suppose a lot of comedians are like that, " she muses. Growing up, Maeve wasn't a class clown. She was quiet, "not introverted, just not extroverted". But at home, she knew she was funny. Humour, it seems, is a family affair, and one of her sisters now joins her on stage for some of her stand-up gigs.

Maeve got into comedy a couple of years ago when a Ray D'arcy radio programme competition attempted to unearth new stand-up talent. Maeve shined, and began thinking about gigging, despite her day-time job working in a clothes shop in St Stephen's Green shopping centre in Dublin. When she started doing open spots, she would get nervous. "I'd start to feel sick from maybe two o'clock. I couldn't eat anything. And the gig would be at half nine or something, so that was seven hours of being really sick and really worried.

Now it's down to an hour beforehand. And some gigs I'm not really that nervous before them. I'm a lot more comfortable, just from practice." She left her day job in July 2005. "I just got too busy with comedy and realised that I could make a living from it." She misses the job though. "It was just such a laugh, I loved it."

Only a couple of weeks away, she's still honing her material for her upcoming tour, and claims not to be ready for the Andrew's Lane set of gigs. "I was just walking around town and saw a Christmas tree and thought, oh my God, this is really soon. I'm starting on 17 December. Okay, God, I have to go!" She pretends to make for the door. One would imagine, at this stage, that you'd be a ball of nerves trying to write a set. "It's not really stressful, because I love doing it. My favourite thing to do is stand up. I love writing it. It's good stress.

It's like deadlines in any job. You just have to fit it all in and do as many gigs as you can in the run up. I'm doing a lot of smaller gigs before it to get my material good and try it out. I'm doing all next week in the International Bar and I'll try and get new stuff ready."

For Maeve, nerves are adrenaline. She doesn't really understand those who don't get nervous, who don't work on their material, who take things for granted. "You know yourself, one night you could tell a joke and the place would fall around laughing. And the next night, you could tell the exact same joke, the exact same, with the same phrasing, and everyone would just look at ya, like. You can't get complacent."

Her family all support her work, and her parents come to her gigs when they can. "I did have one joke about fancying my Dad. It's not true, but. . ." (she lowers her head for dramatic effect) "that was a bit of an awkward drive home with Daddy, yeah, hmm." It's hard not to erupt in laughter at her stoic analysis of comedic taboo.

Frequently, the lines blur between between her personal self, and the one portrayed on Naked Camera, as she slips in and out of various thoughts and character, acting and joking around before returning to her unexpected more serious self. "Obviously, the character I play is desperate for a boyfriend. I just think that's such a funny thing to portray as a woman. Originally I was just going to be this desperate girl and then one of the Naked Camera guys said I should be in a position of authority, to wear a uniform or something so that they couldn't get away from me. That's where the idea to be a traffic warden came in."

The results are absolutely hilarious, and more subtle than PJ Gallagher's . . . although often priceless . . . bludgeoning gags in characters that include a horny old Dublin lady vegetable seller and Jake Stevens, the irrepressible tabloid-wielding, whistling chancer. Perhaps the most memorable sketch of the entire last series was Maeve's portrayal of a girl who failed to make the cut for the Rose of Tralee, then going back to the organisers to ask them for her equivalent of a failed Rose escort to have as her boyfriend. Maeve giggles in recollection, "I couldn't believe she kept talking to me and kept trying to help."

She gets rather prickly when I ask her whether she thinks she's at an advantage or a disadvantage being a woman in a male-dominated scene. "I don't know what it's like to be a male comedian. What I've experienced is all that I know. I certainly wouldn't say that I'm at an advantage." Her ambition is to work at the craft of stand up, which she believes to be the toughest medium in comedy and an artform worth spending time on perfecting.

"Even if you look at Joan Rivers, yes she's crude, but she's just so good at what she does.

She has perfected it. That's my ambition, turn into Joan Rivers, " she cackles, recommends a comedian I should check out and leaves, reminding me to ask PJ Gallagher about the taxman, "just to piss him off".

Gallagher brother

Ten minutes later: "Wet and bothered by taxmen, you know yourself. I have to be a real person for a change, I'm not really used to it." This is PJ Gallagher's answer to "How are you?"

when he walks into the room in biker gear, carrying a helmet. "I prefer being 10 different people and having a laugh. The real me is just paying off bills, pissed off and lashed on in the rain." Gallagher is childlike, eager, sincere.

His giggle is infectious and I spend most of the time nearly doubled over laughing throughout the interview. PJ fell into comedy a bit more randomly than his co-star Maeve did. He worked with Jason Byrne, who always wanted to be a comedian and one day, sitting on a bus, PJ spotted a poster with his own name on it advertising a comedy gig. Byrne had put him on the bill, and there was no way out. And since Naked Camera took off, he's really done for.

PJ is very stressed out with the taxman at the moment. Can he not just file everything under 'Jake', I suggest. "Jesus, I'd love to do that. Go to the bank manager and say, 'Get Jake to deal with it, he's my accountant.'" He switches to Jake's voice: "I don't know anything about it." He talks about 'Jake', as in Stevens, the most successful character to emerge from the Naked Camera project, not in the way someone speaks about a character normally, but almost like a friend or a brother. "For everyone else, me name isn't PJ anymore, it's Jake. I don't even hear the whistles anymore.

I think I own whistling. If you whistle, RTE gets a euro, that's the way it works." PJ prefers "telly" to stand up. "In fairness, the telly stuff gets you the stand up. . . It's a good bit of craic, hanging out with Maeve, Patrick, Liam and all of that. There's a big team element involved in it, whereas with stand up, if it doesn't work out, it's your own f**king fault. The only thing that's better is when you do something that you know works straight away." He'll know what works or not pretty soon, during his own tour all throughout December with a fair amount of gigs, "Ten or twelve I think. Ten. Twelve.

Eight I think. Twelve."

The third series goes out next year. Filming it recently, PJ was almost on the receiving end of a punch when, posing as a reporter, he approached a middle-aged man telling him that he saw him witness a car crash and steal two swans out of the boot of one of the cars.

"He wasn't too happy, " PJ giggles. Next March, Jake Stevens will take on LA . . . and Mr T . . . in a new programme. But other than that, there's no grand plan. "I'm convinced it's all going to stop in the morning. . . Honestly, I really don't know. I never saw this coming. Just to keep doing the things that we're at. Just take it a year at a time. If I'm still at this this time next year, I'll be delighted with myself. I've no real longterm plans. I'd love to get some bigger acting jobs or something, but I don't look like Colin Farrell. That's going to be a real problem, we'll see what happens."

Until then, he tries to keep out of the backbiting world of Irish comedy. "It's really competitive. People are bitchy. It gets more and more like that every year. I'm sure there's plenty of stuff going around about me. That's just the nature of it, I suppose. You just ignore it, keep the head down and just do the gigs. It doesn't really matter what comedians say about you, it's ticket sales, that's the important thing." There is one exception though, "Definitely Jason [Byrne]. He got me into it. He's still the only comedian that can get up on stage and do two hours completely off the top of his head. No one else can do that. Billy Connolly, Robin Williams, some of the greats can't even do that. That's just amazing, so it has to be him.

He's really underrated here. He's bigger in England than he is over here."

Before leaving, he plays me a hilariously miserable voice message from Dave McSavage that ends with "It's raining." PJ erupts in laughter. "Listen, I'm a chancer. I just keep getting away with it. Take it while it's coming, " he laughs, "there's no big philosophy. I've been too lucky. You have to follow your nose, I suppose. If you get a chance, just go for it." He exits the hotel, and at the front door, as if on cue, three men bombard PJ: "Ahhhhh, Jake, where's your paper? ! Give us some money Jake! Whistle for us Jake, will ya? ! PJ gives a wave and backs away from them towards his motorbike, laughing all the way.

We have five sets of two tickets to give away to PJ and Maeve's upcoming December tours (PJ is at Vicar Street, and Maeve is in Andrews Lane Theatre).

To win, answer this question:

What is PJ Gallagher's Naked Camera character Jake Stevens' trademark prop: (a) a bag of chips (b) a rolled-up newspaper (c) a set of jump leads?

Email your answer to magazine@tribune. ie with 'Naked Camera' in the subject line. Please include your postal address in the email. Winners will be notified on Wednesday 6 December