By MISHA KETCHELL

Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt are the men behind hit comic duo Arctic Boosh, a truly absurd act that has quickly become the talk of this year's Comedy Festival.

They say they try not to get sucked into the schmoozy comedy scene. They don't hang out in pubs too much. They try not to mix with the other comics. It makes them sound wonderfully enigmatic.

Fielding is a cocky 26-year-old lad with a shock of shaggy hair. He could've been a pin-up boy if it was 1970.

Barratt, a 31-year-old who likes to impersonate a sultry pig exhorting you to enjoy his many nipples, well, he, too, is a bit of a Babe.

"We did this show in Soho called the Mighty Boosh," says Fielding, cuddling his hotel room couch in shimmering boxer shots and flicking through an upside-down Penguin paperback. "Boosh is just a word, just a funny sound really."

"It was this bloke's hair in our first show," corrects Barratt. He's lying dishevelled and bleary-eyed on the floor, holding forth with stentorian elegance to the ceiling.

"He had this big Afro with doors. We were the zoo keepers. We used to turn up in big overalls."

Huh? The secret is to take it in your stride. With these guys, weird, playful, meandering banter is all you get. That and a strange love between two men, but without a hint of homoeroticism.

They met when Barratt was doing stand-up in London. He'd moved down from the north, bought a bedsitter and had a "romantic vision of myself as an artist beavering away". He says he used to sneak off to do stand up shows, "skulk off like a madman into the night".

Fielding was at art school, where he'd translated a love of absurdist painting into an act in which he played Jesus on the cross and told funny made-up Bible stories. He would paint on a brown beard that would melt down his front under the lights.

"My art teacher said: `Why don't you just do comedy? I've got mates that do it and they're rubbish. You're much better,"' says Fielding.

They first thing they wrote was a TV show that was never made because, they say, the television executives could not understand how it would work. By then their surreal live shows were selling out. "We were just learning as we went along," says Barratt.

"We didn't really know where to stand. Silly things like turning your back to the audience," says Fielding.

Don't believe a word of it. Arctic Boosh perform with a hip nonchalance and a cavalier disregard for staying in character. It is a cultivated style, a conscious stand-up-theatre hybrid. They improvise like madmen and like to giggle at their jokes.

"My favorite actors are people who you know are not the character - you know they're having fun - Jeff Goldblum, Gene Wilder, Kevin Spacey," says Barratt.

"It's a bit like automatic thinking. You get to a point where you don't think about what you're saying. It's just, like, concepts, sounds," says Fielding. "We try and warm ourselves up for the show; we do an impersonation of our agent."

If you've seen Arctic Boosh, you could be forgiven for thinking drugs are involved. The show centres on a story of sorts but features talking jiffy bags, fantasy postal routes, an epic journey into a frozen wilderness, an oversexed yeti. Could this be the stuff of unaltered consciousness?

You bet it is. "We know how it works. It's not the same as really mainstream stand-up. Some people don't get it at all. There's lots of people loving it too much," says Fielding.

"In England they're so guarded and cynical. They'll give you a compliment and it'll be like: `Yeah, I saw you, my girlfriend liked you.' Here they come up and hug you in the street."