Nish Kumar is an openly left-wing comedian. With a recent Have I Got News For You appearance under his belt, the 30-year-old comes to Cambridge this month with the show which won him an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination in the summer.

Long Word…Long Word…Blah Blah Blah…I’m So Clever is an impassioned hour which sees Nish rail against the gradual privatisation of the NHS and against the notion that political correctness has gone too far.

Does he think it’s the comedian’s job to educate his audience and make them aware of political issues?

“I talk about these issues because they’re things I’m interested in, but I think comedians only ultimately have a responsibility to make the audience laugh and how you do that is completely at your discretion. I think it’s great that you can see someone like Liam Williams one night and Milton Jones the next. I suppose I see myself somewhere in between them.”

A few days after I saw his Edinburgh show, the comedian Andrew Lawrence wrote an article in The Times criticising what he saw as left-wing dominance in the current comedy scene. “It’s not funny when all the comics are lefty, preachy demagogues,” he wrote.

Nish disagrees with the contention that there is an inherent left-wing bias at the heart of the comedy industry in this country.

“I do genuinely think it’s harder to write right-wing comedy. I think it would be great if the right was more represented in comedy, but I don’t think that’s because there’s some great conspiracy against right wing comedians. I know from working at the BBC that it’s not full of people working really hard to keep Conservative views off the airwaves.”

Indeed, though this is clearly stand-up with a left-wing bent, Nish is still critical of elements of the left, particularly what he perceives as its inability to communicate its arguments effectively.

“I just feel that sometimes, conversationally, people on the left have a tendency to resort to hysterical and emotional language. There’s nothing wrong with that but I feel that sometimes that comes at the expense of fact and interesting economic arguments that we have on our side.

“Instead of making a case through pounds and pence, we have a tendency to just say ‘Ooh Conservatives are bastards’, and it’s slightly reductive to do that.”

Nish talks about climate change at length in his show, joking that people might do more about it if it had a more dramatic name such as “the environmental fuckpocalypse.”

“You hope Corbyn will get these issues pushed to the front and centre. Obama is doing that now with climate change in the sort of ‘fuck you’ era of his presidency where he doesn’t have to run for anything and can just kind of do whatever he wants. I hope that’s one of the issues that gets brought more to the fore.”

Nish is a refreshing comedian to watch because he comes across as totally at ease with himself. Unlike comedians like Stewart Lee or James Acaster, Nish is seemingly not interested in forging an onstage persona or keeping himself at one-remove from the audience.

“It takes a huge amount of preparation to sound spontaneous, that’s part of the artifice of stand-up. You are trying to contrive spontaneity every time you walk out on stage. In terms of my performance and style, I’m increasingly trying to chip away at my stage persona so that there is almost no gap between who I am on stage and who I am in real life, I’m trying to thin that gap quite consciously.

“I enjoy the lack of any filters, I like the idea that stand-up is a direct connection between my brain and the audience. I want to strip everything way back until the audience is almost inside my head and that’s what I get a rush out of, I enjoy that sort of interaction with an audience.”

I wondered how this affected his personal life. If he is presenting the ‘real’ Nish Kumar on stage do people ever feel let down when they meet him in real life?

Sometimes people I meet are just disappointed that I’m not constantly coming out with zingers but, you know, that’s an occupational hazard. Even though I’m trying to thin my persona down to almost nothing when you see me on stage that’s the result of me having spent a year thinking about funny things to say.”

Nish first tried his hand at comedy as part of the Durham Revue, with whom he came on trips to Oxford and Cambridge as a student.

“University is an amazing place to start doing comedy, especially Cambridge because of the smokers and things like the Wolfson Howler. It’s such a supportive and nurturing environment, and even if it goes badly it doesn’t really matter. If you’re a student in Cambridge and you’re even vaguely interested in comedy you’ve got almost no excuse, definitely get involved.”

Nish Kumar comes to the Cambridge Junction on Saturday 21st November at 8pm.