Having worked for Kieran Hodgson’s jam-packed venue at the Edinburgh Fringe, crowd-controlling the hoards of people desperate to get their hands on a ticket for his one-man comedy show every night, my first question upon interviewing him was as genuinely curious as it was facetious:

“Are you funny?”

“In person, rarely.”

I laugh and then point out to him that this can hardly be true; he made me laugh, at least. However, in a manner that is more earnest than self-deprecating, he explains:

“I have to construct funny things; I don’t think I’m very funny. I think I tend to be quite boring in real life, and then I find a way of transforming that boringness into comedy – but it takes a long time and requires a lot of effort and whenever I’m around people who are very spontaneously funny I feel very stupid.”

This is difficult to believe from somebody who makes comedy look so effortless. Nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award for the second year running, as well as being The Guardian’s No. 1 Comedy show of 2015, Hodgson’s show – Maestro – attracted big players in the comedy scene. Ian Hislop, Dara O’Briain, Mark Watson and Josie Long all attended, not to mention a five-star review from The Telegraph.

Maestro, following the format of his previous shows Lance and French Exchange, tells Hodgson’s life story through a mixture of narration, impersonation, anecdote, one-liners, and by sharing personal experiences ranging from the truly heart-wrenching to downright hilarious. (“Autobiography, albeit fairly early, uneventful autobiography”, he calls it.) I ask him whether his comic talent, like much of his material, comes from his school days, and he explains how he started off by “doing silly voices and the old cliché of impressions of the teachers.” He remembers doing impressions of politicians at the school talent show.

“I was the funny voice guy. I wouldn’t say ‘class clown’ because I think ‘class clown’ implies a certain degree of popularity and coolness, and I was just like ‘Oh Kieran does funny voices’ – that was about as far as my status went.”

His self-effacement, often found in comedians, is softer and more humble than flippant, and makes for an instantly lovable character on stage, with whose mishaps and misfortunes the audience are quick to identify. Yet, during the show, it quickly becomes evident that Hodgson’s life experiences stem from a level of talent and ambition that makes him quite unlike anybody else in the room.

For Maestro, he focuses upon his childhood ambition to write a symphony, and punctuates the narrative with live demonstrations of his symphonic composition, on the violin, as well as recordings of the Finchley Orchestra, of which he is now part, playing the final piece.

“The last few shows have always been about my hobbies,” he says, “and music’s something that I cared about,” a statement which belies perhaps the boldness and potential risk involved in the decision to subject a Fringe audience to recordings of classical music and jokes that appear to rely on familiarity with Classic FM’s shortcomings.

“I relish the challenge of trying to put a subject that a lot of people think is quite elitist or quite difficult to get into, to try and make that into an accessible comedy show for everyone,” Hodgson says. “I thought that’d be fun to try and get away with.” It is to his credit that he does get away with it, entirely. When I finally got in to see the show myself, I was left in hysterics, wondering why one doesn’t hear jokes about Rachmaninov more often.

At the age of 28, Hodgson is still at a relatively early stage in his career. Educated at Oxford, he explains how formative his time at university (tactfully absent from his autobiographical narrative) was in his decision to pursue a comic career.

“I was always a massive fan of comedy and comedians and dreamt that I could do it – but didn’t really give it any serious consideration. But I always knew that if I got to go to Oxford or Cambridge, I’d definitely want to get involved and see if I could hack it.”

He describes going to the freshers’ fair and signing his name at the Oxford Revue table as quickly as he could, before casually mentioning that, after auditioning, he got in and became president after six months. Not allowing himself to indulge in the moment of my evident awe, he quickly oscillates back to his self-aware and self-critical commentary. Referring to his early experiences in student comedy, he remembers “so many mistakes, so many awful shows...” But he admits: “I think it was just it picking up really quickly after I got to uni was a really big indicator for me that I could possibly do it.”

Considering that there were over 200 Cambridge students at the Fringe this summer, many trying their luck with comedy in the hopes of making it just as Kieran Hodgson is doing, I ask him what advice he would give to student comedians.

“I think you just have to make the most of it,” he says. “Don’t wish it away – it’s such a safe space to learn so much. You can fail loads and it doesn’t really matter because you’ve got a really great audience there and there’re loads of people to support you.”

He describes it as “mind-boggling” that there are “talented people who are desperate to make like 100 shows a term”, demonstrating his enthusiasm for the creative work of others, which we see also in his show, during impressions of his childhood self, tragically waxing lyrical about Mahler to his unimpressed classmates.

Hodgson concludes by combining thoughtful reflection with the unbashful and self-critical humour which seem to be at the heart of his shows. “I feel so lucky to have had a couple of years [at Oxford] because if I had come out into the real world and tried to do the stuff that I was doing when I was 18, I would have never gone anywhere near comedy, because the general public would have looked at it and gone...” (he pulls a face and conveys genuine disgust as he draws out the word ) “...eeuurgh.”