After almost a decade as a stand-up, Eshaan Akbar defines his ‘brand’ as light-hearted takes on ‘the stuff that everyone gets furious about’. And he reckons he doesn’t attract as much hate as he deserves. An independent thinker who made his Live At The Apollo debut at Christmas, he is also, instinctively, a button-pusher and wind-up merchant. 

‘I’m reflecting how the world operates, in that everyone now gets very angry, very quickly,’ the 38-year-old reasons. ‘Sometimes things I say end up being quite antagonistic. Over time, people have learned that a lot of what I say is tongue in cheek, and they now don’t bite in the same way. Though sometimes they do. And I find that very entertaining.’

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Akbar’s politics tend to remain his own. He just wants ‘to have as much fun as I can. I’ve never believed in the power of comedy to change hearts and minds.’ As likely to appear on the BBC’s religious programme Sunday Morning Live as on ‘laddy’ podcast Have A Word, the lapsed Muslim is ‘infuriatingly untribal’, according to fellow comic Rosie Holt. Privately educated on a scholarship, ‘a rare brown kid, arriving at school in a Honda Accord rather than a Range Rover’, Akbar was raised by a working-class, trade-unionist father from Pakistan and a Thatcherite Bangladeshi mother: ‘two countries that had a major civil war. I grew up hearing all views. I would also espouse any opinion that gave me the outcome I needed because I wanted a nice dinner. Sometimes I hated the miners. Sometimes I loved them!’

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Now on his first tour, The Pretender, the erstwhile journalist, banker, political speechwriter and Bollywood dancing choreographer is seeking to foreground our inconsistencies and say why they’re OK. ‘I’m trying to highlight that no one can be 100% left-wing or right-wing; we can’t possibly present the same version of ourselves to everybody. And I think that’s been forgotten. A lot of my material reflects me saying things that people don’t expect me to.’ In The Pretender, the non-impressionist talks about voicing Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid for Spitting Image, ‘an appointment made in order to improve representation,’ he admits. ‘But there is no reason for a brown person to voice another brown person. I was distraught when they got rid of Apu from The Simpsons, because it mattered not a jot to me that Hank Azaria voiced him.’

Akbar has also just shot his acting debut in the fourth series of Netflix’s hugely popular comedy-drama Sex Education. ‘I’ve had to play so many different roles in my life and I can tap into that with acting,’ he says. ‘I’ve worked in government, banking and journalism, and what I’ve realised is that everyone is stupid. We’re force-fed this idea that they’re cleverer than they are. We keep elevating these people to positions of power and influence, just because they’re able to have highfalutin conversations over a glass of chardonnay.’

Eshaan Akbar: The Pretender is on tour until Saturday 20 May, including a Glasgow Comedy Festival date on Sunday 26 March.