Hay Festival 2012: Tim Minchin "I really, really enjoyed the process of writing Matilda," says Minchin, who was raised in Australia. Even when I was hating it - even when whole songs were discarded - I knew I was enjoying it. I just feel I can go ahead in my career and challenge myself more now. I'm going to persevere with comedy, but I want to be writing things that outlive my comic persona. Matilda has, he says, led to plenty of interest from prospective collaborators, but uppermost in his mind for now is performing. He adds that playing with an orchestra of "serious musos" has helped him finally to start thinking of himself as a proper musician: "I feel legitimate now." So, for all his apparent self-assurance, Minchin has engaging chinks in his armour. His song Rock'n"Roll Nerd is a lament for every nice middle-class boy who wants to be cool. Besides there has always been more than a dash of irony to Minchin's persona. But when he gets something, or indeed someone, in the crosshairs of his comedy, the results can be as uncomfortable as they are hilarious. The devout, the easily shocked, those averse to robust language - all should tread warily with Minchin, who is musical comedy's very own militant rationalist. In December his performance on Jonathan Ross's Christmas Show was pulled when he sang a song referring to Jesus as a "zombie" and "telepathic vampire." Little riles him more than what he sees as lazy thinking, with religion taking a particular hammering in his songs. "I don't think you'll find anything I've written in the past five years that just pans religion," he says. It only pans the place where religion intersects with prejudice. This is illustrated by the time he was collared by a fan called Sam who claimed his mother's cataracts had been healed as a result of prayer, to which Minchin's response was the lacerating ditty Thank You God for Fixing the Cataracts of Sam's Mum. Now part of his show, the song attacks Sam's apparent assumption that God hasn't got bigger things to worry about. Journalists have learnt to tread warily with Minchin too. One 2005 review stung so much that, three years later, he responded with a ferocious song. Yet Minchin is the first to acknowledge that this overreaction to a poor notice was conceived partly at his own expense. And his stronger material is often softened by his impish charm as a performer. "It's really just playing the rock star," he says. When I started doing it, it was particularly funny, because I'd be there with my hair, my shirt open, and there were barely 100 people in the room. That's ridiculous, because it's so ostentatious - it's such a clash between the act and the room. And then, as years go on, I'm now in arenas where that stuff belongs, and the joke still works. But now he's a type of rock star is there a danger of the joke backfiring? "I guess it is a danger," he says, "but I don't think it has manifested itself. I open this show with a massive song about how now I'm doing arenas I don't have to try, how I'm just doing it for the money. And in saying that I'm basically setting myself the challenge to go absolutely the opposite way, to do everything I can to make the show amazing. Tim Minchin and his band are performing at 9.30pm at the Barclays Pavilion [Event 32]. He speaks to Sarah Crompton tomorrow at 10am in the Barclays Pavilion [Event 36] For Hay Festival 2012 updates, follow Telegraph Books on Twitter