Nish Kumar is a veritable gentleman. But that doesn't mean he's not prepared to chat about the awkwardness of watching sex scenes with his parents. Or the consequences of binge drinking on late night train travel. Or how to correct someone who is incorrectly racist.

His shows manage to combine the mundane and the magnificent, with high brow references and low brow stories. By his own admission Nish is in his element when finding something funny to say about things that are “mundane and a little bit upsetting”. He has been mistaken in the past for both an Arab and Jew, leading to all kinds of confusion. His own father admits there is “nothing Indian” about Nish, and his style of comedy is distinctly British.

As his Edinburgh show this summer confirmed, Nish Kumar is a man on the rise. And despite praise from some prestigious sources he is, as ever, charmingly self-deprecating. Emily Shipp caught up with him in a pub just metres from the Soho Theatre where he'll be performing this December.

Emily Shipp: Have you had any really awkward interviews?

Nish Kumar: Generally it's ok. Sometimes it's more awkward when people know stuff about me. I don't expect people to know stuff about me. And it's really weird when people have done research. There is this part of me that goes, “well, how do you know that?”.

ES: And the more interviews you do, the more of your life story will be readily available online...

NK: Well I've kind of made a rod for my own back with that because most of my life story I have made available to the public in my stand up show, so I'm probably not the best person to start crowing about privacy.

ES: In your last show Who is Nish Kumar? you talked about watching the film Shame with your Dad, and how unbearably awkward it was during those raunchy scenes. Does this get brought up a lot when you meet people in the bar now?

NK: Yeah. People always want to talk about that. That incident for some reason has really captured the imagination of people who went to see the shows.

ES: Why do you think that is?

NK: I think it's because if you know that movie you realise what a spectacularly bad piece of decision making that was on behalf of me... and my father, who I feel doesn't get enough of the blame. It feels like he comes off really well from that story.

ES: Do your parents feel that you've got a proper job now?

NK: I don't think so. I don't think they will ever accept that this is a dignified way for an adult man to spend his life. I think they're getting more adjusted to the idea but nothing will convince them that this is a real career.

ES: In your formative years were there any particular comedians that you really hooked on to?

NK: Yeah, in stand up terms Chris Rock, Richard Prior, Woody Allen and the first stand up I went to see live was Ross Noble. There was a period when I was like a Ross Noble groupie. I think I went to see him on the same tour two or three times and I sort of saw him back to back for a couple of years. And I still think he's brilliant.

ES: Do you find the audience react quite differently to the same jokes in different shows?

NK: Yeah, particularly in a comedy club versus something like an Edinburgh audience or the Soho Theatre audience. Any audience that comes out to see an hour show reacts in a very different way to a comedy club where you go on and maybe people are a bit drunk. So there's positives and negatives because whenever you get an hour it's up to you to warm the audience up so you're performing every function possible. Whereas when you go on in a club you have the luxury of an MC who's warmed a load of people up and they're comfortable in the room, so that completely changes the audience reaction. When you're with people over an hour show, you build up trust so by the end you can say stuff, because it's almost like it's become a conversation by that point.

ES: What's been the worst drunken reaction you've had?

NK: Oh! The worst is just incoherent hecklers. I did this gig in Edinburgh, it was about 1am – I don't know what I was expecting – people were hammered. I did a bit about racism and an audience member was accusing me of being racist in the middle of it and we had this whole dispute about whether it was racist or not. And it's just that weird moral authority people seem to gain after six pints. People go, “No. That is completely... What you've just said there, it's racist.”. It's so difficult to negotiate. It's like the terminator; they can't be reasoned with, they can't be negotiated with.

ES: You mentioned that you're starting to plan for your Edinburgh show next year, what's the process of developing your comedy like?

NK: With comedy club audiences you want to retain that slightly explosive element to it; there has to be that slight element that the whole thing could go tits up at any second. Because those are the best gigs where you're riding this knife edge. It's even better when at points you've thought, “This could implode”. And when it doesn't, you feel like a god!

ES: A lot of your material is quite anecdotal, do your friends and family get nervous that they might appear in your comedy?

NK: My girlfriend does and my close friends always fear that because they're the people that I interact with the most. But a lot of my friends are comedians as well and my girlfriend and my parents are all aware of this filtration that goes into comedy. It's one step removed from reality and I think that's partly why my parents and my girlfriend are now able to enjoy it more because they all realise it's part of a sort of fiction. Even though I don't think I've ever made anything up!

You can catch Nish in his critically acclaimed show "Nish Kumar is a Comedian" from 9th December at the Soho Theatre.