Denis Leary gets around. He’s a reliable actor, an inspired writer, and a bankable producer. He’s recorded a surprising number of hit comic songs (his 1993 “I’m an Asshole” reached No. 2 on the Australian singles chart) and his Emmy-nominated FX drama, Rescue Me, which returns for its fourth season this summer, is an underrated powerhouse. Still, even though he’s one of entertainment’s most prolific entities, Leary may be best known for his vitriolic stand-up routines. And that’s exactly how he likes it.

You’re pretty busy these days. Do you miss doing standup?
Denis Leary: Yes and no. Every fall I do Comics Come Home in Boston to benefit the Cam Neely Cancer Research Fund, and I usually do Carnegie Hall for the New York Comedy Festival. So I do get out and flex my muscles.

Do you ever think about touring?
Denis Leary: Every time I do a gig. I did a show recently with Dane Cook, Patrice O’Neal, and Jon Stewart and I was thinking, Man, I wish I was back on tour. I have a rule for myself, though: I never use old material. Even though I don’t perform a lot, I force myself to keep writing. That way when I do go back on tour, I’ll be ready.

Now that you don’t have that release as a stand-up, are you a murderous ball of tension?
Denis Leary: I’m in the middle of writing a book, so I have a place to go with all that. But you know, there’s nothing like doing stand-up. When that Mel Gibson thing happened, I knew I was going to do a good five- to 10-minute chunk about racism and the vanity of his mug shot. And it wasn’t just the anti-Semitism. It was the idea that alcohol can make you say things—hateful things—that don’t exist in your head otherwise. That’s a great comedy premise. I’m Irish. So, if that’s the case, could we have solved the problems of Northern Ireland by just putting the whiskey away?

Rescue Me is often violent, but it’s also quite funny. Do the two extremes feed one another?
Denis Leary: In a firehouse, guys have to deal with the purest, most brutal of human circumstances. So in order to keep doing what they do, they develop a very black sense of humor. We strive to find that balance, too, because that’s what attracted us to the idea of the show in the first place.

You base a lot of plotlines on stories from real firemen. Have you ever pissed anyone off?
Denis Leary: We have had the occasional negative reaction. But for the most part guys just say, “Well, you got that right.” Sometimes, they’ll even add to it. They’ll say something like, “OK, that was embarrassing. But did you hear about this…?”

So even if someone gets pissed, you can always say, “Hey, you told me the story!”
Denis Leary: Sometimes, I wish we were making this stuff up. But in most cases, we’re not.

Occasionally, the show’s been a little too real for its own good. Following a rape scene, T-Mobile pulled its ads.
Denis Leary: That annoyed me because it distracted from what a great acting job Andrea Roth, who plays Janet, my wife, did in that scene. Also, at the time, two of T-Mobile’s spokespeople were Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton, who’s been videotaped under the same circumstances. It’s all relative, though. There was one woman on CNN crying about what we did in that scene and when they asked her if she’d watched the episode, she said no. But you know, I probably found out about George Carlin’s “Seven Things You Can’t Say on Television” [routine] and The Godfather book because they were banned by the Catholic Church. The more noise people make, the more movies or CDs or books you sell.

Dealing with advertisers and network people, do you ever just want to kill someone?
Denis Leary: No—but only because I have my company structured to prevent that. I’ve joked for years that I’d like to produce some piece of crap that I didn’t like but that would generate lots and lots of money. Sadly, I don’t work like that. I couldn’t do what Eddie Murphy does—putting on a fat suit and playing three different roles in the same movie. I pretend that I’d like to, but I know I’d just be bitching the whole time.

So, no Norbit 2 for you, then?
Denis Leary: I look at that and I think, How do you go to work every day? Self-generating is the key for me. I just try to make stuff I’d like to watch. The only places we pitched Rescue Me were HBO and FX, because those are the only places that would have made it like we had written it. Having said that, though, if I could come up with an idea that would be a brilliant 8 o’clock show on NBC, I would. I just don’t seem to have that idea in me.