Four years ago he toured the country describing the woes that befell him the day he lost his iPod – casting a wry look at society’s reliance on technology and gadgets along the way.

Now comedian Dan Clark is back with a new bone to pick – the neuroses of the modern man and his search for love in a social network age.

“It sounds like I’ve been up and down the country conducting one-on-one interviews with men saying to them, ‘So, what are your issues?’” he says. “It’s more me speaking about the neuroses I have as a single man living in the modern world and hopefully other people will relate to that.”

Addressing everything from the pressures of being a sport-loving bloke’s bloke versus those of being a metrosexual man, Clark sets out to explore the struggle your average Joe faces in finding their place in the world.

“You know that thing where a guy meets a girl and it changes him, then two years later she turns round and says, ‘You’re not the guy I fell in love with,’ and leaves him?” he asks.

“It’s often because they’ve tried to change them to make them more sensitive and caring and I really do think there’s this thing where men aren’t sure if they should be Old School Guy or New School Guy.”

The perils of dating and the technological background behind modern love also fascinates Clark.

“I’m intrigued by how the internet affects the way we meet people now. The young generation will never know how to go up to people and ask them out on a date because they’ve got the comfort and security of Facebook,” he says.

“If you meet someone in a bar you can get their name, look them up online and ask them out via a message. If they say no, it’s much easier to deal with the rejection in the privacy of your own home than if they’d said it to your face.”

Having found fame in BBC Three comedy How Not To Live Your Life – which Clark both writes and produces – this will be his first stand-up tour since 2007.

“I love making television, I genuinely do, but it’s not as immediately satisfying as showing off in front of an audience and hearing their laughter. TV is more like a job – you write a script in January, rewrite for six months, film it, edit it and in September you’re thinking, ‘Hang on, why am I doing this again?’” explains Clark.

“In stand-up I can write a joke in the afternoon and perform it in the evening, immediately finding out whether it’s funny or not. People come up to me all the time and say, ‘Hey, I love your TV show,’ but they don’t necessarily know I’m a stand-up, so I have to remind them that I do this other thing.”

The show – a narrative-based sitcom that ducks out of reality to give day-to-day advice on topics like “Five Things You Shouldn’t Do In A Theatre” and “How Not To Deal With Teenagers”, all acted out by Clark’s character Don Donnelly – has been an unprecedented hit.

Series three has just finished and there are talks with the BBC for another, although Clark is keen to point out that lovable rogue Donnelly is just a character, and not an exact representation of himself.

“Don is a shady, dark version of me – he’s all my bad qualities. The main difference between us is that he has no self-awareness. He has a childlike quality and just blunders through situations. I think I’m more paranoid,” he says.

“Every now and again I’m talking to someone after the show and I can tell they’re surprised that I’m not as much of a d******* as they thought I’d be.”