With a style of humour that’s mainly based around puns and one-liners, Milton Jones has established himself as one of Britain’s most in-demand funnymen. Not only a comedian but also a writer and actor, his stand-up bears testimony to his cutting-edge wit, not to mention his taste for the surreal and the nonsensical.

Lauren Foster caught up with Milton ahead of his gig at The Comedy Loft, Birmingham on Thurs 23 June...

Explain what Midlands audiences can expect from your latest show, Milton...
New stuff and some old stuff. I did a big tour last year, I’ve got a big tour next year, so I’m in transition between sets, as it were. Club work is slightly different, obviously - it tends to be louder and more interactive than a tour show, and you might get families and stuff coming. 

Has stand-up comedy changed during your time on the circuit?
Big time. I’ve been around ages. When I started, it was called alternative comedy. It was an alternative to what you saw on television, but now it’s merged with mainstream entertainment. Michael McIntyre and John Bishop are Saturday night viewing and there’s a lot more stand-up on TV than there used to be. This means that the circuit, the club gigs, have shrunk because fewer people will go out to see comics that they haven’t seen on television, which is a shame in a way. It just means that what will happen in the end is that some students will get together and form a new alternative to comedy. The whole cycle will begin again. It’s an evolutionary thing and it’s how it will be. I’ve been in the right place at the right time in terms of the surge of comedy. When I was doing clubs, there was lots of club work. Now that I’m doing telly, there’s more TV - it’s been good for me. 

Other than a capacity to make people laugh, what skills, abilities or outlook is it necessary to have to be a successful stand-up comedian?
I’d say 80% persistence. I know a lot of people who’re really funny but had a few bad gigs and just didn’t fancy it anymore. Whether I just couldn’t do anything else I’m not quite sure. I think after you’ve been doing it for a certain amount of time, you’re sort of unemployable as anything else, so I kept going. Another thing is that you always have to be reinventing yourself, or at least writing new stuff. If you want to be seen on TV you can’t just do the same old stuff. It’s a cliche about a band - people want to hear the old songs - but people don’t really want to hear any of the old jokes. You’re constantly having to think of new stuff, which is brain ache after a while because if you keep on saying yes to TV, you’re burning all your jokes all over the place. It’s quite hard to sustain that without getting in writers, who can never do it in quite the same way. They can do an impression of what you would do but it’s not as authentic as if it were coming from you. Those are the big things - persistence and constantly reinventing yourself.

How would you describe your particular style of comedy, and what makes it work so well? 
In a sense it’s silly one-liners. I think that if it works, you put a cartoon in people’s heads that surprises them. So you start off and they’re thinking one thing, then you surprise them by changing the ending as you go along. It’s not political or particularly edgy, it’s just daft. It’s a sort of verbal practical joke, but some people really hate that. I think the better the comic you are, the stronger the flavour you are. People such as McIntyre, Harry Hill, all the great comedians around at the moment, some people really like them and others aren’t so keen. I think if you’re bland and everyone quite likes you, you’re probably just not very good. 

Are there subjects which you would steer clear of when developing a set?
In theory, no. But if you mention Madeleine McCann or something like that, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing a very satirical thing about the Portuguese police or whatever, the fact that you’ve mentioned Madeleine McCann means that you’ve upstaged whatever you were intending to do. There are some people who specialise in doing that, but it’s a different sort of thing to what I do. For instance, I used to have a joke years ago that I don’t use anymore. I’d say: “I’m thinking about putting on some holidays for children who have low attention spans but I made the mistake of calling it a concentration camp”. Now that wasn’t about the Holocaust but the second I said ‘concentration camp’, people would go ‘Oh no, no, you can’t say that’. I could’ve argued with them but the problem was I’d upstaged the joke. I decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

What made you decide to follow a career in comedy and what route did you take?
I tried to be an actor, but nobody else wanted me to be an actor. So I decided that doing a stand-up open spot would be a relatively quick way of allowing producers and writers to see me perform. In reality what happened was that the stand-up took over. It coincided with comedy becoming more evident and offering more opportunity. I found I liked it more because I was in control. It was interactive, I could do two or three shows in one night, and I didn’t have to travel to Aberdeen to tour a play I didn’t like. I could just say no to a gig in Aberdeen or wherever it was. I was completely in control. So that was all great and still is, to some extent. That said, I’d go back to some kind of acting if the right job arose, but I think in stand-up you sort of act anyway. The part I play is a part; it’s part me and part performance, and I quite like that. The hardest thing to unlearn as an actor was the ‘fourth wall’ thing of suddenly having to interact with people. As an actor you don’t expect that, and it takes a long time to feel comfortable with it. If you look like you’re ignoring a heckler or are afraid of one, you lose the crowd, so you have to learn to deal with it. It took me a while but now I actually quite enjoy it.

Who were the comedians you admired when you were growing up, and has any single comedian influenced you more than any other?
When I was growing up, the idea of a comedian wasn’t the same. It was people like Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder - comic actors. It wasn’t until I saw people like Harry Enfield and Eddie Izzard on Saturday Night Live or whatever it was that I realised there was something else, something I wanted to try. They weren’t really doing what I wanted to do, but they made me realise that there might be a way through. As I said, wanting to act in the first place, my heroes were comic actors like Ronnie Barker. 

What’s the toughest kind of live audience to face, and the toughest kind of individual heckler?
When I first started, it would’ve been a rough, drunk crowd, but that’s not the case anymore. I did the Cardiff Retail Awards about a year ago and just before I went on, someone said, ‘You know they don’t speak English, don’t you?’ So I now know that the toughest kind of crowd is one that doesn’t speak English! I think I was doing the wrong booking. I did half an hour to the sound man laughing and 400 other people in the room. That’s part of being a stand-up, though - getting used to being in the wrong place at the wrong time every six months. 

Heckle wise, I think I can deal with most things - occasionally you get something so esoteric or philosophical that it completely throws you. Someone stood up in a club once and said, ‘These are just words’. It made me laugh because it was a description and was so fundamental. Another time, someone shouted, ‘What is this?’ That’s too weird. Those heckles can be tricky. Otherwise, sometimes you can just say the wrong thing to the wrong person and they burst into tears. What’s really difficult, though, is a baby crying. Sometimes at a festival, a parent will have brought in a baby and the baby will cry and it throws you. You can’t attack a baby in any way. You can sort of ask the parent what they thought they were doing bringing a baby, but even then you can feel the crowd growing prickly. That’s probably the hardest single thing to deal with. 

And finally, what do you think of the UK’s current comedy circuit?
Broadly speaking, it’s very healthy. There are lots of television shows and that’s good for people like me. What’s a shame is that the smaller clubs are dying off because people won’t go out to see someone they haven’t seen on television, which means no one ever gets a chance to climb the ladder. As I said, some student somewhere will create alternative comedy again and the cycle will begin once more, but at the moment it’s very healthy and is all part of the bigger ‘world entertainment industry’. It’s becoming all about live performance because everything is on YouTube. You see people whip out phones as soon as you go on and you know you’ll be on YouTube tomorrow - that’s quite hard to get around. But in a way, it’s just a changing audience because people see YouTube and then come and see you. It’s swings and roundabouts really.

Milton Jones appears at The Comedy Loft, Birmingham Thursday 23 June