Milton Jones, currently approaching the tail-end of a mammoth 140-date UK tour, has made a career from the humble pun.

The likes of, “I was sitting in traffic the other day… and I got run over” or “Years ago I remember supplying Filofaxes to the mafia… yeah, I was involved in very organised crime” have been his bread and butter since the early 1990s.

They’ve propelled him to great comedic success – he won the Perrier Comedy award for Best Newcomer in 1996 – and now the comedian is regularly seen on comedy panel TV shows such as Mock The Week.

“When I first started [in comedy] I was so terrified that I needed to get to the joke as quickly as possible, so I ended up with a lot of one-liners,” he explains.

“I’m quite word-based, so I’ve just continued doing more of that. However, people think that’s all you do.”

It looks like Jones might be ready to break free of this pigeonhole following his recent involvement with C4 sitcom House Of Rooms, which he co-wrote with fellow comedian Dan Evans.

Jones has just filmed the pilot and, although far from playing it straight, the show marks a distinct change in his comedy style.

“It’s all-round big, silly visual and physical gags, as opposed to verbal ones,” says Jones.

“It took a while to persuade people because it wasn’t a load of one-liners. For example, the final scene we filmed was me tied up under a bed trying to eat a chocolate whilst someone jumps up and down on it. It’s certainly not what they were expecting.”

His involvement in the show harks back to Jones’s previous career as an actor.

“I didn’t like the idea of being a comic as I was growing up. I wanted to be an actor but there wasn’t really much work. The thing about stand-up is that you can get on stage if you make a few phone calls, whereas acting you always have to wait for someone to call you,” he says.

“Having just worked with some actors, they have a different attitude. They’re always writing letters and getting people to come and see them, kowtowing to people in the media, while stand-ups are quite arrogant – they say, ‘Well if you don’t like me, tough’.

“I’d go back to acting for the right thing. You get known for being a certain type of thing – if I ever go for a casting, it tends to be ‘the crazy neighbour next door’ or ‘the man who just woke up’… something that fits in with my TV persona, and it’s quite hard to break out of that.”

Described as “the weird bloke with the shirts” by his own PR (“I think I helped them write that, so I can’t really complain. My thinking was that even if they didn’t remember my name, they’d remember what I looked like”), he now gets to take on different roles through his stand-up.

“I play my grandfather for the first 15 minutes, and that’s a way of doing jokes about the war and old people. Then I come back in the second half and do what I normally do, but with more time to do it,” he explains.

“It’s a lot of jokes coming at you at different angles. I vary the angle of attack, because if you do more than 20 minutes of one-liners you can see blood coming out of peoples ears. It’s just a bit too much.”

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