Australian stand-up Josh Thomas is happy to be leaving Los Angeles after seven years. ‘I find people in LA really annoying,’ he says. ‘I don’t like most Americans. At any party, they’re telling you about their five-year plan and they’re taking G, not because they’re hardcore into drugs but because it’s less calories than alcohol . . . but,’ he gestures helplessly around a room strewn with objects, ‘it doesn’t have to look this bad does it? I know I’m packing. There doesn’t have to be dead flowers.’

Before he resettles in Melbourne, the 37-year-old will be making his full Edinburgh Fringe debut, a rather late bow for a comic who came to the Festival in 2005 as a So You Think You’re Funny? finalist, yet has since attracted international acclaim for his TV series Please Like Me and Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, both of which he created and starred in.

His Fringe show, Let’s Tidy Up, is about ‘one time, two years ago, when I tried to tidy the house,’ he explains. ‘Which doesn’t sound like the highest stakes. But me being untidy fucks me every single day of my life and will fuck me forever.’ His ADHD was diagnosed, insensitively, as ‘incurable’. He smiles at the memory. ‘This poor psychiatrist said one wrong word once, like nine years ago, and now I’m doing an international tour about it! Really it’s about the fact that everyone has something incurable about them. Should we just accept what’s shit about us?’

Standing out recently in the Australian version of Taskmaster (‘I got the lowest score in the history of all the English-speaking versions’), comedy helps Thomas be himself. He still struggles in big groups socially but fans appreciate his ‘particular brand of weird. Since I started at 17, stand-up was a way of getting five minutes of space to explain my point of view. The stage feels safer to me than a barbecue.’

An adventurous gourmand, who has consumed fish testicles and counts ground spicy crickets among his favourite delicacies, Thomas was only diagnosed autistic at 33, midway through writing Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, a sitcom largely about autism. In a case of art reflecting life, his character was belatedly diagnosed in the second series too.

Often surprised by things that people want to keep secret, he’s polyamorous, describing monogamy as a ‘creepy life choice to make’, and recalls being turned off a date in LA when a gunman appeared. ‘Everyone else on the patio ran into the restaurant; there was just me and this boy and we dropped to the floor. And I realised it wasn’t going to work between us because if I wasn’t in love with him on the floor of an active shooting, I wasn’t ever going to be. The gunman was tasered: he’d been shooting BMWs outside a synagogue I think.’

Not lacking in confidence, Thomas has nevertheless resisted four entreaties for sperm donation: ‘two heterosexual girls and two lesbians, one of them very seriously and three sounding me out. I do well in spite of my genes, we don’t need them spread around. One girl wanted to cash in this pact that if we hadn’t had children by the time we’re 40, we’ll have children together. No babe, that’s not a binding contract. No one’s getting my sperm. Well, a bunch of people are; but nowhere near uteruses.’

Josh Thomas: Let’s Tidy Up, Pleasance Courtyard, 31 July–25 August, 6.20pm; main picture: Daniel Boud.