Hip-hop is not very funny. Rappers themselves might be pretty hilarious – try not to laugh at G-Unit in 2008 – but the actual music has more heads nodding than sides splitting.

Obsessed with street cred, being real and packing in as many shout-outs as humanly possible, rappers don’t have much time for jokes. Short of early Eminem or small fry like MC Paul Barman, we can’t think of a single laugh raised in the past couple of years.

Until Joe Viggers came along.

He’s an MC from Norfolk who goes by the name of DPF. This stands for Dope Poetic Flows, Dumb Pissed Fuck or Deadly Pungent Feet, depending on who’s asking. He has an album out called It’ll Never Catch On on Son Records. Listening to it, we found ourselves cracking up more than once at his backhanded, sarky humour.

Check the Tommy Temper-produced joint ‘Rumours’: ‘Rumour has it if you don’t masturbate once a day/ Over pages of naked ladies, you’ll become gay… Heard a rumour that the UK scene can’t stand me/ And sent a lynch mob to find me and hang me/’

“I have got a really weird sense of humour,” says Viggers, stating the bleeding obvious. “I don’t really laugh out loud watching comedies. I do like ‘em, I really enjoy them and inside I’m probably laughing a bit, but I like just life and people’s behaviour. I like the way people react. Human behaviour. Self-deprecating humour – I love it when someone is willing to admit, ‘I’m a proper twat like everyone else.’”

Talking to Viggers is strange. His slightly disjointed musings on how he got to this point in his life are punctuated by outbursts of raw, almost pregnant laughter. He seems, almost, to be laughing at himself – at the folly of someone like him even bothering to put out a rap record. “It’s a tongue-in-cheek title,” he says of It’ll Never Catch On – a name that sounds very, very deliberate. “It’s a middle finger to the industry. It’s a good album, yet nothing will ever happen from it. I’m from East Anglia, not London. I’m not trying to bitter or twisted, it’s just a comment that says I’m not naïve enough to think that anything amazing is going to come from a really good album or not.”

The album is indeed pretty good. Kicking off, he laments his non-superstar status, wailing how he ‘wishes I had one of those faces, the type of face that goes places’ The album continues in this vein, with general invectives littered with occasional social commentary (‘Keith’) and jungle grooves (the vibrant ‘Hoo Rockers’). Production is courtesy of Tommy Temper and Mr Laws, who provide a backdrop that almost matches Joe for sly, crooked-smile musical mentality; all noodley chords and twisted samples. It is, as we’ve said, a lot of fun and every so often riotously funny.
“It’s quite an honest album. It’s not really something prompted, it’s just really my personality coming through from the way that I see things. It’s just kind of my view.”

Viggers pauses for a second, and then does one of his complete conversational 180s: “It’s a really cliquey, bitchy business, it’s who you know not what you know you, not much to do with skills to be honest… I do things a little bit differently.”

Viggers is at a better point than most to be cynical of the music industry – and hip-hop in particular. By the time you read this, Joe will have just turned 32. He’s not exactly putting dentures in before rocking the mic, but in hip-hop terms, he’s practically geriatric. This is a genre that fairly or unfairly, prizes youth over experience. Names like Soulja Boy and Plies don’t come into the conversation, but their presence hangs heavy over it. Joe has dropped two EPs before (one with the fantastic title of Mental Floss) but this is his first LP. In a genre that can be very cruel sometimes to those who don’t fit the status quo, it’s best to put this in cruel terms: can a 32-year-old rapper from East Anglia still be relevant?

Viggers comes with what we must admit is probably the best answer. “I think age equals wisdom – I hope – and wisdom equals something worth saying. I’ve been able to see and hear lots of things. I can have an edge on kids that are only eighteen. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve got skills and imagination and can always make amazing rappers but I think when you get older things are put in their slots a little bit more. There are pros and con though; I think you get more cynical when you get older.”

Viggers has been helping out hip-hop crew Def Tex for ages on their joints, and this month will be rocking the Jazz Café with the Breakinbread crew – as decent a cosign as you can get. He even got to step out with Def Tex for one song when they brought Public Enemy over to the UK earlier this year – even if Flava Flav tried to steal his girlfriend.

“He gave a her a VIP backstage pass,” he says. “His eyes were on her, he was doing this really weird sexy dance in front of her. It’s brilliant, a story she can tell her grandkids!” Another machine-gun laugh. “She thought it was funny, really. But I notice she didn’t refuse the backstage pass. Still got that, I think it’s on the fridge!”

Best get down to the Jazz Café to check this dude out. By taking the piss and throwing two fingers up to conventional hip-hop thought, DPF may just be the realest MC out right now – in every sense of the word. “You just have to be yourself,” he says.

“That’s all I can be. I can’t contrive anything. I couldn’t keep it up long enough to fool everyone!”