AS WITH Clark Kent, you just have to take away Kevin Smith’s glasses and his alter ego is revealed: Silent Bob, the taciturn sidekick who has delivered quizzical glances in six of the writer-director’s seven feature films. The filmmaker and the character wear the same bulky overcoat, the same jean-shorts and the same scuffed-up trainers. The one difference between them is that Smith is anything but silent. He talks in steady torrents of sentences, interspersing jokes with deadpan observations.

At the Melbourne launch of Clerks II, the sequel to the no-budget 1994 release that gave him an unexpected career as the poet laureate of slack at the age of 23, Smith delivered an exuberant performance at the Astor Theatre when the screening was over, talking and joking for hours with loyal fans. It’s common practice for the hirsute New Jersey native, who has built a lucrative side-career speaking at American college campuses. Public appearances also allow him to interact with his fan-base, which Smith has nurtured with scholarly care.

"The fan-base seems to be made up of people who I necessarily wouldn’t call slackers, but many of them live at home and a large degree of them dig what I do because it makes them think they could do the same - ’If a chimp like Smith can pull this off, surely I can’," he says, lighting the first of a steady stream of cigarettes.

Curiously, most of Smith’s fans - an overwhelmingly male and exuberant demographic, aged about 15 to 35 - weren’t aware of Clerks when it was released. The black-and-white film was shot at night at the Quick Stop convenience store where Smith laboured during the day. It was inspired by Richard Linklater’s Slackers and Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi - independent productions that followed the rarefied American film festival circuit and appealed primarily to cineastes.

Clerks introduced blue-collar concerns, popular culture and ribald language to a scene that had previously measured itself by Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It did this through conversations between two store employees - the conscientious Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and the Rabelaisian Randal (Jeff Anderson) - and their customers, on subjects such as oral sex and whether independent building contractors were hired to help complete the "Death Stars" constructed in the original Star Wars trilogy.

Clerks was acclaimed at the Sundance Film Festival and released independently, playing on no more than 50 screens in the US. But it wasn’t until its release on video that Smith’s own demographic - "people who eat a lot and don’t shave", as he puts it - turned out.

These are the people who have kept coming back through a series of antic comedies, including bittersweet Chasing Amy (1997) and the inspired buffoonery of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), where the sideshow took centre stage.

When Clerks II opened in the US earlier this year it played on more than 2000 screens. There was a decent budget this time but the sequel retained much of the original’s ethos: Dante and Randal now labour in a fast-food store managed by Becky (Rosario Dawson), warily eyeing off life’s responsibilities as they head for their mid-30s. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob are still standing out the front, dealing marijuana. Smith’s wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, with whom he has a seven-year-old daughter, also has a role.

All the characters are part of a freewheeling conversation marshalled by Smith’s fetid imagination.

"When I sit down to write, I don’t think about pushing the envelope, I just want to make myself laugh," Smith says. "With the first one, I’d never seen people talking in a film the way I talked with my friends, but once I did that and the movie got out there, I realised that everyone has those conversations. They just weren’t depicted that often. Movie conversations were stunted. But I wanted to have people talking about sex and Star Wars and all the stupid stuff we talk about to forget the fact that we’re going to die."

Clerks II is a far raunchier and often gross successor to the original. It crushes the faint-hearted or easily offended and culminates in the ensemble cast watching a bestiality show involving a donkey. But Smith is convinced Clerks II is more sentimental than his 2004 film Jersey Girl - his attempt to make a warm family comedy, which his fans savaged, and which starred then off-screen couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

"I got tagged on Jersey Girl for being overly sentimental and sappy, but I think Clerks II is far sappier," he insists. "We can just get away with it this time because we have the donkey show and Anne Frank versus Helen Keller. People let sentimentality slide when you make them laugh. Also, the subject matter and conversations are now not that far off what they now talk about on TV sitcoms: sexual innuendo is very frank now."

But despite these predilections, not to mention a publicly confessed appetite for internet pornography ("Sooner or later I’m hoping to see someone I went to high school with," he says), the director does not include female nudity in his films. He wrote one topless scene for his second movie, Mallrats (1995), but the actor involved, Joey Lauren Adams, who Smith was later involved with romantically, was doubtful. "She was like, ’I don’t want to do it’. And I was like, ’you’re right’, because it makes you feel creepy. It’s not necessary," recalls Smith.

"Then the producer, Jim Jacks, said: "She signed up for a nude scene, she’s going to do a nude scene." Suddenly it was this mini-maelstrom and I hated it. It felt like you were asking somebody to do something that was incredibly uncomfortable. From that moment, I haven’t done a nude scene again."

It’s a stand that hasn’t cost him financially. Smith may not be a visual stylist, but together with his best friend and producer, Scott Mosier, he runs a profitable operation. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, for example, cost $US20 million ($A26 million) to make, snared $US30 million at the American box-office and then earned another $US37 million in its first month of DVD sales. (Smith’s devotees watch the films religiously and buy the DVDs, which he crams with extras for further enticement.)

"If you make money for people they’ll let you do what you want," Smith says, but he has found limits to his freedom. Despite a passion for comic books that’s led him to write his own titles and open two stores, he knows he’ll never be given the reins of a big-budget comic-book adaptation.

He acts for other directors - he’s in the forthcoming Catch and Release, alongside Jennifer Garner, as well as Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko. If it’s a trade-off, he’s more than happy with the results. He’s never had to go back to the Quick Stop and, to him, everything beyond that is a bonus.

Clerks II is now showing.