Scottish comedienne Janey Godley has lived a life less ordinary, growing up on Glasgow’s mean streets, sexually abused by her uncle from a young age, losing her mother who was murdered by a boyfriend, and marrying into a gangster family.

You’re here for the NZ International Comedy Festival, which you also performed at in 2002 and 2006. What do you think of Kiwi crowds?

The great thing about Kiwi audiences is they just embrace you, they take you into their heart and they listen to everything you’ve got to say. They’re a bit like Glaswegians because the women are quite ballsy and strong, which I love. They’re like real Glasgow chicks. And you guys live in a land which is a wee bit uninhabitable a lot of the time. The weather can be a bit odd – you deal with a lot of wind and rain and strange weather and yet you all just get on with everything. That’s a very Glaswegian thing.

You’ve been very critical of the Beijing Olympics. Do you know that the New Zealand Government has just signed a free-trade deal with China?

New Zealand people are quite stoical about their human rights, so I’m surprised they’ve signed a free-trade deal with China. That’s a piece of piss. Helen What’s-her-haircut needs a slap in the head. What’s her name? Helen …

Helen Clark.

Helen Clark. The woman with the only haircut that’s been done with a pair of wooden spoons. My mammy used to cut my hair when I was a kid in the 60s and I think my mammy also cut her hair with a big pair of blunt scissors.

I’ll bet the New Zealanders are up in arms about [the free-trade deal].

Some are, but not as many as you might think.

I think it’s disgusting, the Olympics should be boycotted. It’s harking back to Hitler and the Munich Olympics. It’s just wrong. And they can keep on saying as long as they want that it’s all about the sport, but they can piss right off, their human rights are appalling and we should not be glorifying a country like that.

You must be incredibly busy – you do stand-up, you write a weekly column for the Scotsman newspaper, you’ve written a book [her biography, Handstands in the Dark, was a best-seller] and a play, you act, you have a blog, you do community work – how do you cope?

You just keep working – that’s the Glasgow work ethic. You rest when you’re dead, really. Glasgow women work right up to the day they die, then they drop down dead and everyone goes, “Oh, there’s a job gone free.” It comes from my family – well, not really, just my dad; the rest of my family are layabouts. But I come from my dad’s side of the family, who were right strong workers, and they worked all their life; all the women worked and all the men worked. I used to work in a pub for 15 hours a day for 15 years so this is really a piece of piss.

You have just reached the milestone of outliving your mother. What does that mean to you?

It means a lot because Annie died when she was 47, on the first of April – she was murdered. I’ve always worried about reaching this age because a lot of the women died young in my family. When I think back to my mum being 47, she was a really old woman, and here I am at 47 doing stand-up all over the world. My daughter Ashley is the exact same age as I was when my mum died. And the very thought of me being 21 and watching my mum packing up to go and tour as a comedian is absurd. I just couldn’t imagine my mammy going, “Well, I’ll see you in a couple of months – I’m off on a world tour.” I’d think she was a mental patient.

You do community work in Glasgow?

Yeah, I just did a workshop with kids this morning. The kids come from a real drug-addicted area. I teach them stand-up as a form of confidence building. I’m so thrilled to be working with them because they’re such good kids. And they have a really ironic sense of humour, which is wonderful. I love doing it – I could do it forever. They’re very dear to me.

Drug addiction is a problem close to your heart

Yeah, 22 of my friends died of heroin addiction back in the 80s, and I wrote my play The Point of Yes about that. And my brother’s currently a drug addict and he has HIV. I’m not the cure for drugs, but if you can give kids a bit of confidence and teach them that there is a way out … I’m not saying every child should be a stand-up but it’s a way to make them feel important and special, and that their voice is also worthy of being heard.