WHEN it comes to performing his new show Pun Gent, there’s one faculty that Stewart Francis will rely on more than any other: his memory.

Firing gag after gag is not for the scatterbrained.

“Remembering them all and in the right order is the tricky part of my style of comedy,” he confesses.

“I approach it the way I do a script, so there are chunks that lead on to other bits while one joke will tell me that I’m at the end of a certain chunk. It’s the only way I can do it.

“But the beauty of being a one-liner guy is that while there’s a flow, I could still pop a joke in from the middle of nowhere that I might have forgotten to do earlier and it won’t be distracting: it’s just another one-liner.”

In this day and age when a comedian seems to be just one passing comment or joke away from a tabloid storm, Stewart Francis might not be a comic you’d immediately associate with the ‘offensive’ branch of contemporary stand-up. But that doesn’t mean he’d reject performing a gag he’s come up with just because it might touch a raw nerve somewhere.

“I just want the jokes to be funny and in terms of closer-to-the-bone ones, I wouldn’t run three of them in a row because then that would become a theme and I’m then a comedian I don’t want to be.

“For me, comedy works with the element of surprise, so I like doing a couple of kitten jokes and then something dark, as that catches people off-guard and is beneficial to the joke.

“But I don’t deliberately go looking for a dark joke, they come up as and when. You as an audience member don’t have an idea about my take on a particular subject matter; if you take a step back and look at the joke, you’ll see that it’s just wordplay.”

Stewart Francis is at the Wyvern Theatre on Friday, April 17 at 8pm. Tickets are £19.50. To book call 01793 524481 or email swindontheatres.co.uk