Stephen K Amos: Finding the Funny

Meanwhile, the pigs frolic in the dark earth, giggling over their disastrous plague that will surely doom us all.

But comedian Stephen K Amos is in no mood for your whining. He's still drinking to get over the land down under.

He said: "I've just come back from Australia so I'm just getting back onto England time, which involves a lot of drinking and staying up to ridiculous hours. It usually takes me about two weeks."

He should be just about over his jetlag and his hangover when he steps onto the Hackney Empire stage on June 5. Either way, he promises to lift the gloom clogging apocalyptic London with his show Find the Funny.

He said: "I find a lot of people are being quite sad and full of doom and gloom. My philosophy is that there are funny things everywhere, and you just have to find them.

"They'd just introduced this body temperature measuring machine at the airport when I was on my way out of Australia, and if your reading was over a certain number you'd be quarantined until they'd checked if you had swine flu.

"There are now adverts on British TV telling us how to sneeze. This is stuff my mum told me when I was three years old. It's scaremongering really."

Stephen K Amos wandered into a press storm of his own in February, when he casually mentioned on TV that Prince Harry had told him he didn't "sound like a black chap" at a comedy show last November.

He said: "It was an incredible shock. I had to lie low.

"I was being hounded by press. It was the most outrageous thing. I had The Sun and The News Of The World turning up at my gigs. I just wanted to do jokes.

"I had people sending me emails asking, 'How could you stoop so low to get some publicity?'. To be honest, it was taken out of context, but I'll be much more careful in future."

As a gay comedian, Stephen has touched on race and sexuality in his sets, and explored homophobia for his Channel 4 documentary Batty Man. But he tends to resist calls to act as a "talking head" for similar discussions.

He said: "I've made a conscious effort to say no, because that's not all of me, and I don't want to become a spokesperson or a talking head. If I did all the talks and accepted all these offers, I'd never have time to work again."

His panel appearances on shows such as Have I Got News For You have put him in the sights of the reality TV shows, but he's not biting as yet.

He said: "The one thing I've done is Masterchef, because I love cooking.

"I don't see myself going down the Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity road. I was asked to take part in a show that Jim Davidson was doing, trying to reinvent himself, and I get asked to do a lot of Celebrity Weakest Links and Strictly Come Dancings.

"It's really quite bad. It's easy to say that's what the public want, but it's all they're giving them."

Stephen will soon follow up Find the Funny with a new show called The Feel Good Factor, which will again take advantage of his conversational style.

He said: "I'm not an angry comic. When I started, I just thought it was about standing there and telling jokes. I used to have a pad with jokes on it.

"I finally realised that nothing of me was coming through, so I just started talking.

"I don't humiliate my audience. It's about inclusiveness, and having a good time."

Stephen K Amos is performing at the Hackney Empire on June 5 at 8pm. Go to hackneyempire.co.uk