“There was a bloke in the crowd who was unconscious. I was saying, ‘If he wakes up, we’ll forget it in a week. I really hope he’s dead, we’ll remember that forever,” says Mark Steel of his last gig in Hove.

“But I don’t think he was, the b******. In ten years I’d be doing an interview and they’d go, ‘Mark, it says here you’ve actually killed someone with your jokes...’”

The political comedian thankfully hasn’t let the disappointment put him off returning to the city. He’s here to promote his third autobiographical book, What’s Going On?, which details his attempts to make sense of his midlife crises.

“When you reach 40, you expect things to be stable,” he explains. “Even if you’re an arsonist, you’ve probably come to terms with the fact. But all the things I expected to be stable began to fall apart.

“I don’t think that would make for a story, except in the sense that my confusion tapped into the mood of the time. It seems to me that with the domination of big business over everything, and with millions of people opposing the war but it not seeming to make any difference, there is mass confusion – and my own feelings fitted into that.”

One symptom of his middle-aged angst was Steel leaving the Socialist Workers’ Party, which he had been a member of since his late teens.

He stood in the Tory stronghold of Croydon and Sutton during the 2000 London Assembly elections and is keen to stress that he abandoned an organisation rather than his beliefs.

“If you say you’re a socialist to someone in their mid-20s nowadays, they look at you with quiet, quaint fascination, as if you’ve said you still worship Zeus,” he laughs.

Described by Francis Wheen as “the funniest Marx since Groucho”, Steel began performing in 1982 and broke into television and radio a decade later.

His first radio show, The Mark Steel Solution, had the slogan “Give me 30 minutes and I’ll convince you of anything”. It put forward outlandish ways to tackle modern social issues, such as “Anyone born and bred in England should be deported” and “Everyone should be gay for two years”.

His next project was The Mark Steel Lectures, a series of comic appraisals of the lives of important historical figures from Chaucer to Chaplin. They became an even greater success, starting out on Radio 4 before being adapted for television.

Whether working as a columnist for The Guardian and The Independent, or putting Ben Elton and Bono into Room 101, Mark’s mission is to make us smile while fighting the good fight.

“Mostly, the book is trying to be funny. If as a result of this book a new social movement came about which attracted millions of supporters and led to the removal from office of George Bush and the Project For The New American Century leaders, and Tony Blair was arrested as a war criminal... but it didn’t make people laugh – to me that would be a failure.

“I don’t want to run the world. It’s meant to be a joke.”

  • 6.30pm, £6, 01273 736222
  • Admission price includes a free glass of wine