“I’m basically someone who wanted to be an academic political theorist but couldn’t not swear.”

This is what you can expect from Ahir Shah’s comedy show Machines at the Aylesbury Limelight Theatre tonight (Sep 23).

“It’s about the way we are in the present and the tussles between future as it could be and the resurgence of various violent and reactionary elements of the past, reasserting themselves on the present and also it’s got a joke about lizards in it.

“It is political comedy and it is silly. It is everything in the world that I get angry or sad or confused or feel powerless in response to and then talking about it seems to be a way of imposing some degree of control.”

Ahir, 25, grew up in Wembley and continues to live there at the moment until he can “find some ridiculously overpriced hovel in south London”. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Cambridge University and would probably have been an academic in another life.

“I think that is the easiest way of sitting in a nice room and drinking throughout the day while occasionally shouting at young people,” he tells me.

With comedy that is nitty, gritty and silly I wondered to what extent, if any, he hopes to influence people with his jokes.

“A joke is a way of conveying really complex information within a really simple bite. That is what I’ve always enjoyed when I watch other comics, with political issues or personal stuff, the nicest element of it is when later that day or weeks, months, years down the line something will happen that will immediately take you back to what you heard.”

People often say politics is a subject to be avoided, as there will always be someone in the vicinity who disagrees, but Ahir thinks that is exactly why it is good to talk about.

“I’m constructive in the way I talk about things and say ‘this is my opinion, but I’m just as likely to be wrong as anyone’. I always quite like it when other people who might disagree can have a constructive conversation about that.

“The world is becoming increasingly fragmented and partisan, that’s part of the problem. If people don’t talk to one another and then I go out and do my comedy in some sort of left, liberal echo chamber that convinces me that the entire world thinks the way that I do. What are you going to achieve? Nothing.”

I understand where Ahir is coming from, but when you have to go on stage in a room full of people, what if everybody disagrees? Or worse still, what if nobody cares?

I ask if that happens and with utter nonchalance he replies: “Oh yeah, of course. I deal with that badly.

“It happens increasingly rarely the longer you go. There’s always going to be the occasional one where a curve ball hits you or you are in front of a room full of people thinking ‘these guys do not care, they would really rather that I wasn’t here’. Each situation is different in its own horrid way.”

While continuing our conversation Ahir quickly looks something up on his phone and then returns to my question about what happens when a show goes badly, offering a quote from a Frank O’Hara poem, Meditations in an Emergency.

“‘Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days ‘there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth’.

“That is how it feels.”

Aylesbury Limelight Theatre, Queen’s Park, Aylesbury, HP21 7RT, Friday, September 23, 8pm. Details: 01296 424332