Marriage? It's just a joke...

Weddings are one thing. Marriages another. Stupid Cupid, a very funny addition to the maligned genre of chick lit, argues that successful weddings and successful marriages have, in fact, about as meaningful a relationship to each other as rapturous orgasms and, nine months on, healthy babies.

The novel's heroine, however, is so determined to have her day in church that when her lacklustre fiancè dumps her with six weeks to spare she madly decides to go ahead with the wedding anyway. Much is written about women racing against their biological clocks to get married. Stupid Cupid leaves you wondering if the ticking they hear is actually the time-bomb of the wedding itself, and if the real disaster does not lie beyond the aisle, with the wrong man, in Unhappy Ever After Land.

Its author is the comedian Arabella Weir, who is 43 and unmarried but has a partner, Jeremy, and two children: Isabella, four, and two-year-old Archie. Weir's special subject is female neurosis. On The Fast Show, she invented the self-explanatory caricatures Woman Men Can't Hear, Pushy Saleswoman, Different With Boys and, most notably, Insecure Woman, who wondered, even while reporting live from a war zone in a flak jacket, "Does my bum look big in this?"

"I'm not against marriage," Weir says, "but I do know that with most people I know who aspire to marry it has nothing to do with the quality of the relationship they're in. It's about wanting to be married and having this big day. People say, 'I knew he was the bloke I was going to marry.' No you didn't. You felt like getting married and therefore, when he asked you, you made it into something romantic." Is that so wrong? "It's not wrong. It just won't take you through 40 years."

We meet at her publisher's offices in The Strand. Although the film rights to Stupid Cupid have been sold and her previous novels, Does My Bum Look Big In This? and Onwards and Upwards were best-sellers, Weir reassuringly still exhibits symptoms of the low self-esteem that made her name. "Ooh, sorry, I've just burped," she apologises. I say I really hadn't noticed. "But I had to cover myself in case you did notice and then write, 'She burped and didn't even say excuse me'."

Similarly, Weir must have thought that if she first drew attention to the size of her bottom through comedy, it would shrink in size, mentally. I ask if she's proprietorial about her famous catchphrase and she says extremely. Her lawyers got one advertising campaign featuring a rip-off Insecure Woman scrapped, but threw in the towel when Special K commercials purloined the phrase and Anthony Hopkins used it again in his Barclays Bank "Big" campaign. "Of course, it existed as a phrase before but, and I hope you agree, it could have never been used in a comic way until it had been established as a comedy catchphrase. But the people who use 'Does my bum look big in this?' reply every time that they have never heard of The Fast Show. How likely is that? Especially in advertising?"

Let us wind back to a time before Weir wrote novels, had children and threatened to sue if you stole her jokes. Once she too was desperate for a big wedding, a big dress, the whole big deal. "I definitely," she says, "thought a wedding would provide an element in a relationship, a magical element, that couldn't be there otherwise. I thought it would make somebody who was just sort of OK perfect."

The trouble was that her men were frequently less than OK. "I had resigned myself to not being able to pick a good 'un. I knew I'd have more boyfriends, but I thought, 'Am I ever going to go out with someone who's nice and interesting and behaves properly, or am I just destined to get off with tossers?' - not that they were all tossers, but I have to say the diamonds were few and far between."

Enter, in 1995, Jeremy Norton, a 27-year-old biology student, 10 years her junior, who had come to paint one of her rooms. After a week they were sharing a bed and, soon enough, her home in Crouch End. She was pregnant within a year. Seven years on he is still finishing a PhD on fish parasites. She thinks she was rewarded for waiting. "My dad used to say, 'There won't always be another bus', and I said, 'So I should get on a bus that's going to Walthamstow even though I live in West Hampstead?' I still cannot believe how lucky I am with Jeremy because he on no level feels like a compromise."

She credits two years' therapy for letting her recognise true love when it came along. "Before I'd have thought, 'I can't get off with a 27-year-old, what will my future be? It was probably therapy that made me see him for what he was and not what he could offer."