‘My youngest child called me the other day, crying hysterically that his older brothers were saying he was a mistake. I said he wasn’t a mistake, none of my precious babies were … their father was.’ Black American comedienne Thea Vidale shrieks defiantly and slurps her drink.

She wowed audiences at the Edinburgh Festival and answered back Clive Anderson this week, rat a tat a tat, shooting from the hip. Risque, all consuming, car-sized and sitting with her legs apart, she won the audience over brilliantly with her armour-plated bra, ferocious, honest humour and force 10 personality. Her largely unrepeatable act encompasses everything from oral sex to the royal family and she has a rage about racism. What makes her funny? ‘My honesty. The sexually explicit jokes just show how imaginative I am,’ she says, in a lazy drawl. She finds British audiences more ‘re-zeeeerved’ than American ones and she’s harder on us: ‘Americans have a strong, strong aversion to the truth.’

We’re sitting in a West End hotel (‘London is cute but too goddamned cold and the Queen is ugly’), other guests are navy besuited while she’s resplendent in see-through crochet top with rose-covered bra screaming from 44D breasts, scarlet acrylic nails so long they curl, spiky Rod Stewart wig and a stud in her nose. She gestures magnificently and grunts. SHE HAS a loving face and sunny smile; a face that looks surprisingly innocent and doesn’t show the suffering she’s endured. ‘I’d say I’m a big sexy woman.’ (Paroxysms of giggles.) Laugh she may, but, 36 now, she was a battered wife for 10 years. She waitressed in a redneck Texas restaurant, taught at nursery school, started comedy, got some money and in 1984 left her husband and their four children. They’re only 13 (the twins), 11 and 9 now.

‘My husband was an evil man with a black heart. Once he hit me with a chair when I was breast-feeding. Another time I was pregnant and he went to throw the TV at me. He had a machete to cut me up with. I said, ‘If you cause me to lose this child, they’re gonna see you in Trinidad in a box, nigger, ‘cos I’m gonna kill you’,’ she hisses. Oddly, she says all this as if she’s on stage performing.

She stayed married ‘because of her children’ – jokingly she calls them Hell Fire, Damnation, Pestilence and Scurvy – but when she got the courage and money to go, saw ‘nothing wrong’ with leaving them with their father. ‘He was a great father. He did love them,’ she says, surprisingly. Doesn’t she fear he’ll turn on the children? ‘I’ll kill him if he does. I carry a handgun.’

How has she resolved her feelings about abandoning her offspring? ‘What feelings should I have?’ she says, heatedly. ‘I didn’t give them away, I gave them to their father. I did what I had to do. I had no one to take care of them and I refused welfare. I can’t have four children on the road with me, they have to get an education. I’m doing this for the bigger picture, so I’ll be able to afford things and good colleges for them.’ She has seen them six times this year.

Vidale handles many of her emotions by eating. ‘I know I’m fat. I’ve seen myself naked several times,’ she laughs. She is actually sensitive about it. ‘But I don’t let it become my whole focus. If you love somebody, you love them for themselves, not the size of their body. A size three body doesn’t make you a better person.’

She doesn’t have a man at the moment (‘I don’t want to share my money with anybody!’) and she hasn’t been helped emotionally by therapy. ‘I went to shrinks on and off from when I was seven years old through to high school. I was a very hyper kid and was expelled in second grade (aged seven).’

She shuns shrinks now. ‘I’m not spinning $80 an hour for some motherf***** to tell me some s*** I already know. I’d say I have a lot of aggression which I find hard to let go. But when I do, I can be a bit of a bitch.

‘I also love and miss my children,’ she says quietly. ‘I see myself in them and when that happens, you can see the good and the bad. When youzze not always bin seen as a good child, you revel in the fact that your children love you unconditionally.’

Vidale is showbizzy, angry and warm. She seems to be in emotional pain and I think there’s sometimes a fantasy element in what she says. She sees herself as ‘righteous, loving and a wild crazy woman and homebody’. And funny. We’re talking about London waiters, and suddenly she says: ‘Caroline, do you scream when you f*** or something? You seem so reserved. You do f*** don’t you?’

Later she grabs my notes and reads them. ‘Boy, that’s really clever. Oooh I wouldn’t have bothered about that myself.’ She’d like a late-night talk show (‘If I was interviewing Madonna, I’d make her feel really small. I can make people really squirm’) to record songs, do a lot of movies and appear in The Bill. ‘I’d like to play a villainous character, like Fu Manchu with hair.’

Thea Vidale appears at the Hackney Empire from today until 13 December and 17-20 December.