James Acaster has the air of a man in control.

With a handful of recent Mock the Week appearances under his belt, the thirty-year-old comes to Cambridge this week with the show which won him his fourth consecutive nomination for Best Show at last summer’s Edinburgh festival.

His blend of neurotic, observational whimsy sees him talk about cheese graters and ready-to-eat apricots on stage, mining the smallest aspects of daily life for comedy gold.
Indeed, for the Kettering-born comic it seems no topic is too small.

“This is certainly the persona of someone who believes that everyone else thinks the way he does and that it’s a normal way to be thinking.”

His sheepish demeanour and drab, jarring clothes make it immediately clear to the audience what Acaster is about.

His persona is that of a socially awkward over-thinker, bemused by his own ability to entertain.

But how did he develop this alter-ego and is it really that far from how he is in real life?
“I do think it’s about finding who you are as a person”, he says.

“I wasn’t really aware of it as I started off but as I was writing I realised that I tend to over-analyse little things so it was a good fit to go into that for stand-up.”

I wondered if that meant he felt doubly pressured in normal life, agonising over whether every observation would make good comedy.

“When I started off I was definitely doing that all the time because I didn’t know what I was doing.

“Everything was quite frantic and I’d worry that I was ruining comedy for myself because I’d be analysing everything that happened in my life, wondering if I could make it work as stand-up.

“But a filter emerges in your head so that as things happen to me in the day, every so often a light will come on and I’ll think I could do something funny with that. It could just be one word but I’ll then go and try it out at a gig.”

But what is it about the observations that do filter through that makes them stand out?

“Every so often you feel that you’ve found something that people can relate to but that goes under the radar a lot of the time.

“That said, sometimes you just want to talk about Yoko Ono on stage so one year I just did that.”

Interestingly he cites The Rock as a big inspiration in informing his bemused onstage persona.

“l think it’s one of the best comic creations ever and it is a big influence on me. He’s this guy who takes himself so seriously but is really an absolute joke. When comedians find themselves funny I am rarely able to get on board with it unless it’s genuine laughter.”

Talking more broadly, it seems to be the slow process of whittling down his material that Acaster most enjoys and this is what makes him the consummate comedian.

“It’s about gradually piecing a show together, figuring out what it is, so it’s like you’re dusting off a dinosaur skeleton, trying to find it all.

“To be honest it’s more like you’re discovering it sometimes than creating it yourself.”

Acaster is philosophical about the trials and tribulations a touring comedian faces, especially in those early stages when you’re trying out a lot of material for the first time.

“I have bad gigs all the time and it never stops. I used to get moody about it but now I’ve accepted that every year I’m going to do badly for a while before I figure my show out. And a lot of people in the audience will think that I’m very unfunny and find me very tedious and annoying. But that’s okay.

“Comics being the neurotic people we are, if we were getting nothing but good responses from an audience, night after night, we’d start worrying that we were doing something boring and middle of the road.”

Having grown up in Kettering, Acaster left school during his A-levels, sidestepping a path that is familiar to so many successful comedians, especially those from Cambridge.

“I’ve never felt like I’ve missed out on it. I didn’t want to go to university because I knew that all I was going to do was get in debt. I wanted to do something creative and that was being in a band. I’m glad that I took the opportunity to do something completely uncompromising for five years. Even though it didn’t get anywhere and wasn’t a success, I really value those years as it means I’m coming from a different place with my comedy.

I wondered what made it so uncompromising.

“It was not music that anyone else liked apart from me and my friend. It was experimental stuff, really difficult to listen to because we’d have lots of different melodies going on all at once.

“I learned that it’s a good idea [to] try to meet an audience halfway so I think I found a middle ground that has informed my stand-up.”

It was while he was still in the band playing drums that he did his first few comedy gigs, initially as nothing more than an adrenaline boost.

“But when the band stopped I was 23 and that was the only thing I knew how to do.”
I ask him what he would have done if he had never done those gigs.

“I think I would have either started another band or moved to Kenya”.

From Kettering to Kenya?

“Yeah, just going down the alphabet really. I was nearly going to go but then I ended up doing stand-up instead.”

In his new show Represent he talks about his time doing jury duty on a double murder case and dishes the dirt on his fellow jurors.
Is it a true story?

“Well, that is for the audience to decide.”