Never mind that it's a black farce about mourners from a dysfunctional English middle-class family blackmailed by the dead man's gay lover, who happens to be a dwarf, nor that it was filmed in London with a mainly English cast and crew. "I don't know what a British comedy is, " insists American director Frank Oz. "I just do comedy."

When Death At A Funeral was premiered before an audience of over 7,000 at Locarno film festival in August, everyone was in stitches, so much so that it won the Grand Prix, a rare achievement for a comedy. "Comedy is a communal experience, " says Oz.

"You can't show it in an empty screening room early in the morning to a few critics."

He's convinced people everywhere laugh at much the same things. "You hope that what you laugh at, other people laugh at.

That's pretty much all you can do as a director." He has shown his universal touch creating iconic characters like Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and Sam the Eagle on The Muppet Show, and Cookie Monster, Bert and Grover on Sesame Street, not to mention the Jedi master Yoda in the Star Warsmovies. He switched to directing with the 1986 cult musical Little Shop Of Horrors, featuring Saturday Night Live pals Bill Murray, Steve Martin and Christopher Guest. He teamed Marten with Michael Caine as rival conmen on the Riviera in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, used Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss to send-up the arrogance of psychiatrists in What About Bob? , broke comic ground on how gays are depicted in In & Out, and satirised Hollywood in Bowfinger, with Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy.

"I always wanted to do dramas, " says Oz, a professorial man who wouldn't be out of place on a campus. "I just got stuck with comedies because I was successful with them. I approach cinema very seriously but the outcome is laughter. For some reason comedy has always been the lesser cousin to drama, which is confusing to me especially as all the doctors say how good it is for you."

His parents were amateur puppeteers who fled to the US after the war. "My mother was Flemish, my father Dutch.

They escaped to North Africa and then to England when the Nazis invaded. I was born in Hereford but after six months we moved to Belgium and later across the Atlantic in the middle of a hurricane, ending up in Oakland, California. "I never wanted to be a puppeteer but did it to please them. Jim Henson spotted me when I was 17 and I was with him for 30 years. He nearly gave up on me because for a long while I wouldn't do voices. I had no confidence whatever. My adolescence lasted longer than normal, unfortunately. Part of that was not knowing who I was and not thinking that much of myself.

Nothing I've done was ever planned. I don't know what I'm doing sometimes. I believe in the old saying, man makes plans and God laughs. We're human. We're too complex and vulnerable and confused to plan anything."

Death At A Funeral has provided a chance to get back to basics after his big-budget remake The Stepford Wives flopped. "It was my fault, " he says. "When you get stars like Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken and Glenn Close, everything balloons around them. All of a sudden the producers think, oh we've got to make a bigger movie. I should have said no. I should have kept it small and intimate."

Much the same happened with his heist thriller The Score, starring with Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Angela Bassett. "People were disappointed that it wasn't more acting fireworks. But that's not my job. If I'd put the spotlight on the stars, I'd have thrown the story and the characters out the window. It's the expectations that build up around a film that really hurt you. People think it's going to be one thing and feel let down if it's something different."

He enjoys puncturing audience preconceptions. "I love being subversive. I don't like being politically correct. I like annoying people." He famously fell out with Marlon Brando on the set of The Score. "It was a hellish time because I did not handle him very well. For a day-and-a-half I was too tough and too confrontational. He hated me, totally hated me, and I didn't hate him at all. I thought he was just like Orson Welles. They were both childlike in many ways. I think that's where genius comes from.

People talk about how serious you have to be at art, but I think real genius comes from that kind of innocence. Orson said to me over dinner that other people create out of experience, he creates out of innocence."

"It's very hard to keep that innocence. I try hard to hold on to it and not be jaded. Innocence and naivety is like being a virgin. You lose it and you can't get it back."