With an atmosphere pitched somewhere between an illicit political rally and a hesitant pride gathering, a wildlife documentary about a critically endangered species or a highly selective sexual kink, I’m in a windowless basement, surrounded by almost exclusively bald, ginger men with beards. Inside Glasgow’s Van Winkle bar and its subterranean, speakeasy-style performance space accessed via a fake bookcase and quizzical looks from the kitchen staff, I’m reminded of Being John Malkovich when the celebrated actor crawls into his own smoothly polished bonce, to be confronted by hordes of insanely gibbering fellow Malkoviches.

Artificial light is bouncing off shining pates, illuminating russet whiskers. A nightmarish approximation of . . . what? Battery farming? Egg cloning? Orangutan baiting? The conversation is cheerily, casually communal. Nevertheless, it feels wise to be congregating underground, out of civilised sight. With a microphone in hand, one bald, bearded redhead stands above and apart from all the other recessive genes and receding hairlines. Ray Bradshaw is here to launch his Doppelginger stand-up tour in Scotland (ginger ground zero, the flaming mother lode) by trying to find his one true lookalike.

Of the more than 350 submissions he’s attracted so far, the results have spanned generations and continents, and include some exceptionally dark corners of the US penal system and specialist man-on-man dating apps. This feedback is invariably wounding to the Glaswegian comic. And it would break a more sensitive soul. But they’re good comedic fodder too. Although he can’t legally offer discount tickets for his fellow copperchins and firecrotches, in what would have been an unprecedented instance of ginger positive discrimination, Bradshaw is truly enjoying doing this ‘frivolous’ show.

As the son of deaf parents, since 2017 he has been simultaneously signing his tours for the hard of hearing and is ‘knackered’ from all the exertion. This time round, he’s simply speaking and employing an interpreter. And he’s fully committed to his conceit, hiring a giant, electronic billboard outside the Westfield Shopping Centre in London to advertise for even more of his doubles. ‘I spent a lot of money on that,’ he sighs. ‘Then it was foggy. Before me it was Emma Watson advertising Dior. And afterwards it was Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka. You look like an absolute loser standing beside a billboard waiting for your face, this face, to appear.’

As well as the footballers John Hartson, Liam Boyce and James Collins, Bradshaw has also been likened to comedians Broden Kelly of Australian sketch troupe Aunty Donna, and Tarot’s Adam Drake. But the comparisons he usually attracts are seldom that flattering. Even actor Michael Rapaport, good-looking enough to be in Friends as Phoebe’s boyfriend (and with whom Bradshaw shares a face if not a hairstyle) is 53 and the best part of two decades older than the comic.

Gesturing around the basement at his melanin-shunnin’ brethren and Titian twins, Bradshaw beams broadly. ‘Everyone here is eye candy compared to what I usually get. Every morning I get a picture of another guy in my inbox and it generally makes me laugh so hard.’ Bradshaw met his wife after he lost his hair. ‘It must have been part of the deal for her,’ he speculates.

Her absence from the gig remains conspicuous but is perhaps understandable lest her head be turned by a similar model. He recently discovered some grey hairs lurking in his beard, meaning his quest to find the ultimate doppelginger has also become a race against time. ‘I always thought that gingers don’t go grey,’ he laments. ‘It’s coming. Yet every time I go to Australia, New Zealand or America, I meet a new incarnation of me. I think this could rumble on for years.’

Ray Bradshaw: Doppelginger tours until Friday 3 May; main picture: Jiksaw.