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When Hollywood talks about "bankable" stars, it's really only talking about a handful of actors - Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Jodie Foster and Will Ferrell.

For every interesting box-office failure Ferrell offers the public, such as Melinda and Melinda or The Producers, he makes at least two megahits: consider Elf ($220-million worldwide); Anchorman ($90-million); Talladega Nights ($163-million); and last year's Blades of Glory ($145-million). Even Bewitched, dismissed as a flop by critics, hauled in $131-million, and none of these big numbers include home rentals. That math makes Ferrell's antics a solid investment. He's more than bankable - he's the bank itself.

And the former Saturday Night Live player earns every penny. A shameless ham, he will do anything for a laugh: run around naked, drape his ample, hairy trunk over a kitchen table, sport swimwear that would shame a Chippendales model, or, in his latest film, the deliriously silly Semi-Pro, vomit, sing a puerile disco song, wrestle a bear (yes, a real bear) and allow the camera to lovingly pan up his jiggling thighs, right into the underside of his jockstrap.

Fans flock to Ferrell's films because he creates characters endowed with a loveable mix of manic narcissism and keen vulnerability, guileless idiots-savant who are half Tasmanian devil, half wobbly puppy. You watch him because you know he will always up the frantic ante.

How do you know when something's funny?

Um, I never do. And I think anyone who says they do is a liar. That's why we shoot so many options on each scene, to get different versions and takes, because until we get back to the editing room, we literally don't know. Obviously, in each of those moments, there are things I personally think are funny, but in terms of whether it's going to work for an audience and be considered funny by everyone. ... That's where we give ourselves some wiggle room and try to have different versions. I learned this on Saturday Night Live, when there would be so many times during a read-through when you'd be reading a sketch and everyone at the table was just falling out laughing - and then you'd put it up and. ... crickets. And vice versa. We'd say, 'Oh yeah, that might work,' and barely chuckle, and audiences would think it was so funny. So I just kind of developed this really thick skin. I don't know how many times after a take I've said, 'I don't know, I hope it's funny.'

Are some people innately funny?

Yeah, yeah! I think people are. We've all had friends that made us laugh. There's just something about knowing instinctually what's funny or how to make people laugh. And some people are quietly funny and have never exercised it, then they learn later how to bring that out of themselves. I remember taking a stand-up comedy workshop, right after I graduated from college, a six-week course that ended with a performance. The teacher would book rooms for the people who did well at the end of the class - technically in nightclubs, but really in restaurants - and we'd all tape our acts and bring them back for analysis. And I never saw anyone who wasn't particularly funny getting any funnier.

You often use the same actors in your films. Are you building a Preston Sturges-style company around you?

Sure! If I can keep getting paid to do it! If you have actors that you're friends with who are funny, like, why not work with them all the time? And we do sometimes write parts for specific actors whose voices we hear when we're writing.

Your last two films, and now Semi-Pro, are often described as satires of sports movies - but I think they actually are sports movies, just funny ones.

They're really three different movies. Talladega is really more of a cultural movie, we're talking about that NASCAR culture. And Blades of Glory came along because no one had really looked at figure skating comedically, so that was commenting on everything from the sport to the attitudes of the people involved. And with Semi-Pro, we're not making fun of basketball as much as we're taking a look at the American Basketball Association [a now-defunct league] and the ABA era, which was so strange. Anything you read about the ABA, the stuff we do in the movie isn't nearly as outlandish. Way stranger stuff happened. But we do use the sports-movie arc; we either make fun of that arc or use it to our own advantage.

You appear to have no boundaries around how your body is presented in films.

Hee-hee! Yeah, not really. I'm not really an exhibitionist in my private life, but I did kind of make a quiet promise to myself that if I was gonna have any success in comedy I would never hold back - there wouldn't be a moment of me saying 'Oh, I don't do that.' That's kind of the whole purpose of comedy, to go to places that people wouldn't normally ever dream of going. And a part of that is the physicality of it.

More power to you. Why are the 1970s such a bottomless well for comedy?

It's an alien time. You can't believe that people dressed like that for real, and the attitudes were so bizarre. I just did an interview with Bob Costas, the sports announcer, who got his start in the old ABA, and he was commenting on the outfits, which are hilarious, and he said if you walked into a bar wearing the stuff I'm wearing in the movie, people would want to know where you got it and how much it cost. No one would have batted an eye. I guess we'll look back on the nineties. ... but maybe we won't. I mean, the eighties were kind of kooky, but not like the seventies.

A Will Ferrell movie is a kind of social contract with an audience: People know what they are getting, or at least think they do, before they buy a ticket. That must be both gratifying and a bit constricting.

Yes, you know ... I guess I am thematically attracted to the same kinds of things, in a way. And it's certainly gratifying that people understand that, but I'm also trying to keep an eye on that, change it up a little bit. I am conscious of that, [so] I'm very excited about a movie I have coming out in July, Step Brothers, because to the naked eye it will be another Will Ferrell movie, but it really isn't. It's a living-room comedy, a domestic comedy. But I've never really tried to cater to any one thing at one time. I've never consciously thought, 'Oh, I don't do that in a Will Ferrell movie.'

Anchorman ends with you in a duel with a bear, and you take on another bear in Semi-Pro. What's with you and bears?

I love any sort of big game. Yeah. Bears, cougars. My next goal is to get in a fight with some sort of large bird of prey. But in Land of the Lost, I fight dinosaurs -

Land of the Lost!

Ha! Yeah, we start filming Monday. Is that a good reaction you just had or a bad reaction?

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Particulars

Born: July 16, 1967, Irvine, Calif.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

Unlike many comics, Ferrell claims a relatively sedate childhood; he remained close to both parents after their divorce, and while his father was a professional musician (a member of the Righteous Brothers), Ferrell was no child actor. At the University of Southern California, he joined a fraternity and studied to be a sportscaster.

ON STAGE

After college, Ferrell worked odd jobs and launched a performing career. (He met his future wife in an acting class.) Ferrell took comedy classes with the Los Angeles improv group the Groundlings, and soon joined the company.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK

Ferrell - followed by his friend and fellow Groundling Chris Kattan - moved on to Saturday Night Live in 1995; he became a star during his seven-year stint. (And with his George W. Bush impression, he coined the word "strategery.")

ON THE BIG SCREEN

Ferrell had a small role in the first Austin Powers movie, then starred with Kattan in the SNL sketch spinoff A Night at the Roxbury (1998), a notable bomb. But he found success with another SNL colleague, writer Adam McKay - the two co-wrote Anchorman and Talladega Nights.