On a good night improvised comedy has the power to wake the dead. At least that’s what Paul Merton discovered earlier this month when his Impro Chums launched their first performances since last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

“We were doing a Shakespeare scene where I was dead on the stage,” remembers Merton. “Lee Simpson came on as a cat and started licking himself and playing with bits of paper like a kitten – all non-verbal stuff. I could just hear these waves of laughter around me so I had to wake up from my death to see what was going on!”

In Merton’s world it is always impro and not the American improv – “what’s improv short for? Improve?”

For this latest impro tour he is joined by fellow Comedy Store Players Simpson, Richard Vranch and Suki Webster, plus former Whose Line Is It Anyway? star Mike McShane.

“Mike has this ability with Shakespearean dialogue – he can just do it,” says Merton. “He starred in a lot of Shakespeare when he was young, and has a good singing voice – he’s just finished doing Sondheim at the Menier Chocolate Factory [in London]. It’s fantastic – he brings another element.”

Having a group of friends together on the road is important for impro.

“I have been in groups where two people can’t stand each other,” he says. “Every scene ends in a massive argument – if there’s the arrival of a new baby, then it’s not yours.

“There is potential for ruining the show. I have seen it happen, and participated in it as well!”

Although Merton started out in stand-up, and with his brilliantly surreal 1990s Channel Four television show The Series, it is on the impro stage he is most happy.

“When you get stand-ups in the Comedy Store dressing room it is a very different atmosphere,” he says. “They are self-confined – they’ve got themselves to this position where they can be booked at the Comedy Store and they’re looking out at the first acts going on, seeing who is dying on their arse.

“When it’s the Comedy Store Players dressing room everyone is chatting about sport or politics, or a piece in the newspaper until someone tells us it’s time to go on. There’s no tension, because there’s nothing to worry about – the show doesn’t exist.”

This tour mixes games, an extended Shakespearean improvisation, and a new feature based purely on audience suggestions selected from a bucket onstage.

“It’s the most thrilling part of all,” says Merton. “There are no boundaries; it can be a song, a monologue or something involving all the five of us.”

When it comes to making suggestions, Merton says simplicity is key.

“If you’re trying to do a funny scene and the joke is already in the scene then it won’t work,” he says. “You’re trying to get laughs out of something which has already had laughs.

“The best are simple things with a twist – like the man who made the deckchairs for the Titanic. He’s complaining about the work he put into those deckchairs, varnishing every one, and moaning about how this sort of thing always happens to him, without seeing the disaster in a human context.

“If the suggestion was ‘The man who made the deckchairs for the Titanic is really annoyed that the ship has sunk’ you can’t do that scene as there is no surprise.”

He feels part of the reason impro remains popular is the fact audiences are watching adults at play.

“It’s like we all used to do in the playground before adult concerns engaged us,” he says. “There is a discipline – you have to make sure the audience is engaged, and if it’s not working you have to change the improvisation.”

And he is proud of the influence cult 1990s Channel Four impro show Whose Line Is It Anyway? has had on a new generation of performers.

“Edinburgh is now full of dozens of groups doing impro shows,” he says. “It’s something that when it works it is the best; the audience is sucked into the theatricality and sheer impossibility of it.

“We’ve done about 12 shows already, but it feels like we only started last week. It doesn’t get much better than this.”

Duncan Hall

Essential information

Starts 8pm, tickets from £20. Call 01273 709709.