Sarah Lyall
New York Times News Service

LONDON – The first thing Stephen Merchant does in his new stand-up act is seize the elephant in the room and wrestle it to the ground.

“Any money I make,” he tells the audience, glinting happily, “I don’t have to share with you-know-who.”

We all know who you-know-who is: Ricky Gervais, Merchant’s writing partner and the familiar figure fronting their many joint projects, including “The Office,” British television’s most successful comedy export in years. Although Merchant has sometimes appeared in front of the camera, most memorably as Gervais’ dumb-as-a-brick agent in “Extras,” he has always seemed happy to hover in the background while his friend soaks up all the credit.

Not anymore. Merchant strode out on his own this autumn, playing to sold-out crowds in a 42-city, 80-date “Hello Ladies” stand-up tour across Britain. The tour was actually a return to something: Merchant had made a modest name for himself on the stand-up comedy circuit before meeting Gervais in 1997.

Merchant’s comedy routine is gentler, less spiky and less meant to provoke or spread uneasiness than that of his prickly, controversialist friend. He lampoons his own extreme stinginess (“If you go on a Steve date, there will be no popcorn”); his extreme height (he is 1.8 meters and 18 centimeters tall); “I spent a lot of my youth leaning”); and his extreme haplessness, as when an attractive woman in a crowd at Trafalgar Square asked him to wait for her, “because my friends and I have arranged to meet back at you.”

The audience loves him, and so do critics. “Where Merchant excelled over his accomplice was by avoiding the sneering narcissism that has crept into Gervais’ manner since success has encompassed him,” Paul Rowland wrote in a review in The Western Mail this fall.

Merchant, 37, goes out of his way in the act to present himself as inept, verging on hopeless, and as being thwarted at every turn by Gervais’ brighter star. He shows the audience the first photograph of him ever to appear in a British newspaper. Here, projected on a giant screen above the stage, is the “Office” team at the Golden Globes in 2004, and there is Merchant proudly standing behind Gervais – with his head mostly cut off. He then displays an early Guardian article about the partners, in which he is referred to, even in the headline, as “Stephen Mitchell.”

“The idea is that I’m secure enough to play an insecure person,” he said of his onstage persona. “A lot of stand-up comedians are actually very insecure, and they come on slightly battling the audience. They want to be the superior person in the room, sneering at the world. That can be very funny. But to me what’s more interesting is that the world is on my shoulders, and it’s pushing me down.”

He said he did not feel so pathetic in reality, though he was coy when asked about his true-life romantic situation. “I’m not going out with anyone,” he said, “but I wouldn’t tell you if I was.”

Nor is he consumed by actual jealousy or resentment toward his more famous colleague. Having Gervais star in “The Office,” a show they created and wrote together, was completely natural, not a case of “Rick, let’s make you a star, and then in two years I’ll be a star,” he said. “It was, ‘Let’s make a TV show.’ We were just amazed we got something on TV.”

The show emerged from a short film about office life that Merchant made while on a BBC training course he had enrolled in to seek gainful employment after hosting an alternative-radio program with Gervais. “They gave me a camera team for a day and said, ‘Make something,”’ he explained. “Everyone else did a real documentary, and we did a fake one. We went to Ricky’s old office and got some actor friends of mine to do some improvisations and cobbled this thing together, and his performance was off the charts.”

Even as Gervais has been propelled forward, Merchant has been doing stand-up quietly on the side, ducking into clubs and practicing little snippets. “So there was a little bit of downtime and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve never really nailed it, and wouldn’t it be interesting to try again and see if I could be good at it?”’

For a performer Merchant has an unusual attitude toward performing, he says: He can take it or leave it.

“I’m weirdly unmoved by the applause,” he said. “I don’t feel like: ‘This is me at last. I’m only myself onstage.”’

And he would like to make it clear that he is not as aggressively parsimonious as the character he purports to be onstage. “I’m not mean and cheap about splitting a bill at a restaurant, but my thought is: That guy’s just had three courses and I’ve only had a starter?” Merchant said.

And recently his accountants asked for four free tickets to his show. “I thought, ‘OK, but you’re not going to give me free accountancy,”’ he said. “I’m happy to give them tickets. But my mind is still telling me what a generous man I am.”

He does not know yet whether this will be the start of a new long-term career; he has found that the tour has become more gruelling and the hotel rooms less thrilling than they used to be.

“I thought that sheer bloody professionalism would help carry me through, but at the moment I’m saying this is both my debut tour and my final farewell tour,” Merchant said. “Although stand-up is a little like malaria: You think it’s passed, but it’s there in you forever.”