‘PEOPLE have said to me, “On one level it’s quite clever, and on another level it’s not clever at all,”’ says Milton Jones, analysing his own comedy. ‘I think that’s a compliment,’ he laughs. ‘I’m not sure. You could take it either way.’

He will be in West Fife in the autumn and is looking forward to his visit to Dunfermline's Alhambra Theatre.

Over the last 20 years Jones has established himself as the master of one-liners. The professor of puns. The king of the zingers. And nonsense has always played a crucial role in his streams of non-sequiturs.

Even Jones’s on stage appearance screams ‘absurd’: the wild hair, wide eyes and garish Hawaiian shirts. Put those alongside his beautifully constructed pieces of wordplay, and it’s helped the 52-year-old stand-up stand out among the t-shirt and suit-wearing comics on ‘Mock the Week’, which Jones has been regularly appearing on since 2009.

But, in his new touring show – ‘Milton Jones is Out There’ – we see Jones questioning the importance of his own nonsense in our increasingly divided times. Could we see an end to the silliness and pun-foolery? Answer: absolutely not, as I quickly find out when we meet in a London café.