LIKE the bobbies on the beat, comedians seem to be getting younger.

Daniel Sloss is only 25 but he already talks like a seasoned professional. With good reason – he started out at the tender age of 16.

But where he used to talk about trivial teenage preoccupations such as computer games and embarrassing schoolteachers his new show, Dark, finds him moving dramatically up through the gears.

“Comedy has a responsibility to say something,” he says. “Stand-up is one of the few jobs where people don’t just want to hear what you have to say, they will pay to hear you say it. You don’t get that in politics.”

Dark is his most personal and political show yet. As well as self-mocking routines about his own failings, he argues against ‘tampon tax’, calls for the legalisation of cannabis and, most movingly, shares a family tragedy that changed him forever — the death of his sister Josie.

“I just couldn’t make it funny before. I wasn’t a good enough comedian. But earlier this year I was in LA on a radio show called Risk where you have to tell a story you’ve never told onstage. So I talked about my dead sister. It went so well I thought I’d see how it would work in a club.”

He checked with his mother whether she felt OK about him doing it and she even told him further stories that he added to his routine.

He has clearly inherited his quickfire brain from his parents. His father Martyn is a computer programmer developing underwater sonar and his mother Lesley has a PhD in microbiology and biochemistry. They may have also be the most supportive parents any comedian has ever had. Martyn used to educate Daniel with stories of seeing Jack Dee doing club gigs in the 1980s, while Lesley bought him a fake ID online when he was still legally too young to enter some of the clubs where he was performing.

Sloss is very much a Scottish comedian. But he was actually born in Kingston-upon-Thames near London because his parents were working there at the time. “Just because a horse is born in a sty doesn’t make it a pig,” he giggles. By the time he was four he had a cockney accent, “so it was straight back up the road to Fife.”

For the last four years he has shared a flat in Edinburgh with two close friends, Kai (Humphries, a fellow comedian who regularly tours with him) and Jean, who has a degree in psychology: “I think I’m one of her case studies.” The arrangement provides him with plenty of material. “Jean always complains that it is a boy flat so when we are away she will put flowers out, whereas me and Kai have a life-size velociraptor in the living room and arcade machines.”

Sloss plans to stay in Scotland despite the fact that his career is also taking off in America, with producers edging to make his life into a sitcom.

He frequently flies to LA to pitch projects. Producers there are fascinated by his domestic set-up and have suggested he turn that into a sitcom: “Because it’s Hollywood they want the end to be Jean and me getting together.” Sloss would be happy to do some acting in America, as long as he doesn’t have to drop his Scottish accent. “I say no, it has taken me so long to find my voice”

After almost a decade in comedy he feels as if he is only just starting now.

“Until this show I was just doing ‘porridge, porridge, porridge’ jokes. Now I want to say something,” he says.

“I hate the stand-up I was three years ago. I was out of my depth in this world. I was just a kid. I think I’m on the way now. But I’m still not the comedian I want to be yet. Nobody celebrates getting an eighth of the way up Mount Everest.”

Dark will appear at the Arts Centre on October 21. To book call 01793 524 481 or visit swindontheatres.co.uk.