Funny man Jimmy Carr chats to Seven Days ahead of his forthcoming visit to Lighthouse, Poole

This Best Of… tour is your 12th tour show. How have you continued being so prolific?

This one’s slightly different as obviously most of the jokes were already written – all I had to do was choose my favourites and then try and remember them!

There’s no secret to being prolific in general though, really. Mostly it’s down to how I work. A lot of comedians build a show off one flash of inspiration. My process isn’t like that at all.

For tours when I’m doing predominantly new material, I will have come up with about 1000 jokes or so but only use about 250. The trick is to be writing constantly. Chuck Close once said “Inspiration is for amateurs, I just get to work” – could not agree more with that statement.

Why are you doing a Best Of… show?

Well partly it’s because I wanted to see if it was possible, to see if you could do a stand-up show where you just played the hits like a gig from a classic band.

I also remember seeing John Maloney at the Comedy Store 15 or 16 years ago right when I started, and he came on stage and said ‘I’ll start with some jokes’. He did ten one-liners off the bat - boom, boom, boom, boom - and then told a longer story.

I remember thinking I would like to do a show where it is just that, where you have that first opening salvo of bang, bang, bang and it never lets up. And that’s part of the reason to do this tour, the idea of just dropping bombs for two hours.

One liner after one liner - all killer, no filler. Also I really love these jokes and, unlike a musician, I don’t get to perform them once the show’s finished touring. You just sort of put them away forever. That always struck me as kind of a shame.

Will the show be the same every night?

Hopefully not. Obviously there will be a lot of written stuff, but I like to find a balance between the guaranteed laughs of jokes I’ve come up with in advance and the off-the-cuff stuff. I think on a good night it is 80/90% of jokes that I have written and am performing to the best of my abilities.

But the best bits always involve the audience, the bits where I don’t know what’s going to happen or where it will lead. Why go and see a show live? Why not just watch it on Netflix?

It’s because the funniest bits are always the things that happened in the room that night. You’ve got to have a show ready though, just in case the crowd is reluctant to get involved.

You often joke about supposedly “taboo” topics onstage. Why is that?

Comedy is all about building up tension and then releasing it. Talking about taboo topics is a fast way to build tension and the more tension, the more laughs when you finally release it.

I’d also say that one of my favourite sounds in the world is laughter turning into shock. I’m obsessed by cognitive dissonance - the idea that you can make people laugh and be disappointed in themselves for laughing at the same time. And as long as the laugh comes first, even if it’s half a second before, it’s fine. I like the idea that you don’t choose what you laugh at, it chooses you.

Do you ever worry about offending people?

Not really. If you believe in free speech, you have to be prepared to hear things you don’t like – that’s kind of the deal. If you say someone is “offended”, what you’re really saying is that they’re feelings got hurt. That doesn't put you in the right.

If you’re not laughing, you’re well within your rights to just not listen. That’s absolutely fine.

How do you feel about being famous?

I like it. I think comedy brings a nice shade of fame though, because you’re well-known but no one puts you on too much of a pedestal.

It’s not like being another kind of performer, an actor or singer say, where people are perhaps more reverential of your talent. Everyone – or nearly everyone - has a sense of humour, so people just tend to try and make me laugh. What’s not to like?

Jimmy Carr, The Best of, Ultimate, Gold, Greatest Hits Tour is at Lighthouse, Poole, on Sunday, December 18. Tickets are available from lighthousepoole.co.uk or 01202 280000.