STEP away from the mobile phone. Put away the tablet. Rich Hall is about to take to the Wyvern Theatre stage, and he wants your undivided attention.

“What I love about stand-up is the immediacy of it,” says the American-born comedian ahead of his 3:10 to Humour tour.

“Having run the gamut of TV panel shows, after a while you know how to do them and they are not so much fun anymore.

“But now I know I’m going to be on stage somewhere like Melksham, and that prospect is really exciting.

“For those two hours, no one is looking at their phones.

“You have someone’s complete attention, which is almost impossible nowadays. You can’t go to a sports event without someone tweeting about it every five seconds.

“People don’t even listen to President Obama speaking without looking at their phones all the time.

“So maybe those two hours when I’m up there on stage provide a respite from all of us slowly turning into gadget-pedalling robots.

“If that’s the case, then it’s pretty cool.”

Rich Hall has been described as a transatlantic messenger lampooning each country he visits with his common sense comedy.

But the stand-up, who was the inspiration for the curmudgeonly barman Moe Szyslak in The Simpsons, has a soft spot for the UK.

“I may have become overly familiar with the motorway service stations of the UK, but I really like discovering new places. It’s important to visit out of the way towns because it gives you a new perspective.”

One of the many aspects that distinguishes his live act is the way he can craft on-the-spot songs out of the smallest items of information that he gleans from the audience.

“I do what Americans call ‘crowd work’. I really enjoy that because I can turn it into improvised songs, which is a big thrill for me. I always have a guitar beside me on stage in case something happens.

“If you told me I would have to listen to anyone – apart from Richard Pryor – on stage for two hours, I’d think, ‘Oh God’. So it’s good to break up the show with musical interludes.

“It’s funny, the less I get from people, the more you can improvise.

“Nothing is out of bounds. I want them to tell me, ‘I’m a clerk,’ rather than, ‘I work for the council finance department and am involved in the end of year expenditure’.

“As soon as I hear the word ‘clerk’, my head immediately starts formulating rhymes for it.”

The fuel that powers his comedy is a marvellous sense of simmering fury.

Of course, he is not that irate in reality – it is simply a persona he adopts for comic effect on stage.

“It works because people know that I’m not really that angry. Anyone that angry should not be doing comedy. With my style of slow-burn comedy, the crowd know that you can’t be that worked up. The worst thing you can do is get really angry on stage – then you’ve lost it and you’re in Michael Richards territory.

“I’m not really angry at all. There are very small outward changes in my emotions. I have a sort of deadpan Walter Matthau visage. People think, ‘this guy looks grumpy’, but that’s just how my face is put together. Your comic demeanour has to match your face. Most comedians fit their face.”

Unlike his more puritanical, or shall we say polite countrymen, we Brits have given him a hard time or just plain insulted him. That honesty never fails to amaze and delight the comic.

“Brits like to insult you. Sometimes they come to the stage door after the show and say, ‘we really prefer Lee Mack’. They don’t even say, ‘we really enjoyed your show – you’re our second favourite behind Lee Mack’.

“But I know the subtext – they must quite like me if they have waited in line to insult me!”