A comedian who embodies the very soul of Canada, Ron James is used to being on the run.

So it's cruelly ironic that he's come up lame just as he's looking at an extended stint at home in Toronto.

"My knees. Cartilage, man," James says, exchanging injury stories as fellow runners do.

"I went for just a f-----' walk around the (Beach) boardwalk and I needed to ice it.

"The thing is, it's part of my routine on the road. Take my sneakers everywhere, crack the paper in the morning at my hotel, have my coffee, half a powerbar, a banana, go out and run for an hour and come back and write for three. It's like stuff would leak into my head.

"Calgary's great to run in, Vancouver around the Bow (River), Montreal around the mountain."

And as he brings several months of his Mental As Anything tour round the clubhouse turn to the Winter Garden theatre from tonight through April 4 -- followed by a commitment to write a CBC series pilot -- his thoughts are becoming more down-to-Earth.

The guy who has made a living describing this country to its inhabitants in an absurdist, alliterative stream of consciousness (" ...travelling from Kamloops to Prince Rupert on the Caribou Highway, stuck in a whiteout with rigs plowing out of the snow with the force of a Biblical prophecy ..."), now says "I think the 'Cross-country view' (routine) has pretty well been done."

His new show, he says, is "a review from the trenches of the everyman with a small-p emphasis on politics."

Not Harper versus Iggy politics, but the politics of an Alberta that acts surprised every 20 years when they live high on the hog and then have the price of oil crash on them -- again! Or a Bay St. where all of a sudden Canadian banks are considered heroes for having hoarded their obscene profits in recent years instead of risking them.

"I never got mileage slaggin' Toronto in my travels across the country," says the Nova Scotia-born James. "I always felt that was an easy out. In fact, my dander got up more times than not, because it's the city that gave me a career.

"I know that Calgary always has a bee in its bonnet. But I said when I got there in the fall -- and it's even more obvious now that they're a billion dollars in the hole -- the Eddie Stelmach oil patch gulag has gone t--s up 'cause the politicians never put anything aside for a rainy day. I said onstage 'Geez, you can't blame Trudeau and the East this time, man. You're like a guy in a tavern fight who doesn't know who to hit.' "

Further East, he says, "Bay Street's still not making any bulk store purchases. One of the greatest ironies of this (subprime meltdown) is that Canadian bankers turned out to be heroes for doing nothing. It's like Superman's bizarro planet. I was saying to somebody the other day, 'Hit me with a brick so I know I'm not sleeping.'

"It's not like me and my kin owe the banks any favours," he says. "Sweet Jesus, as a self-employed person you get a warmer welcome at their front door waving a copy of The Watchtower."

From expectations then and now, to global warming, to the disappearance of the seven-toed lemur, "I'm trying to present an eclectic buffet of choice," James says. "I think it's the comedian's job to connect the dots and make some sense of the chaos we're all walking through in the language of funny."

His series order came after repeats of his standup comedy specials on CBC last summer.

"They put them on with no advertising and the numbers were really good. So they said, 'Why don't you create something a little closer to what it is you do onstage, seeing that's what people seem to want to watch?'

"So I created a hybrid with me doing standup and a sort of rotating (sketch) cast and animation, and maybe some music further down the line.

"If nothing else, I wouldn't have to be in Thunder Bay in February."