TOM Stade, the ex-pat Canadian who swapped British Columbia for Britain a decade ago, is calling his latest stand-up show a suitably inviting You're Welcome.

He is less open when asked "what's the new show about, Tom?", as he ventures into Yorkshire to play Fruitspace in Hull on March 17. “It’s comedy and it’s really funny and it’s a whole new show. People always ask that question and I’m always blown away by that. It’s stand-up comedy. I don’t do themes. I do funny.”

He can even see the funny side of a 60-date tour schedule from late-January to May 28 that sent Tom from York last Friday to far-off Aberdeen the next day. "I don't think a lot of thought is put into it. It's just, 'you get your ass to this place and make them laugh'," he says.

"That's the job of a comedian. I don't make you lose your home. I don't try to destroy your family."

Tom likes to keep the role of a comedian in perspective. "For me, I've never been big on fame. I've never wanted to be a somebody. I want to be a nobody so that I can be anybody," he says.

"When you think of yourself as a comedian, you put yourself in the parameters of being comedic, and so, for me, the only way to stop that is not to think of yourself as a comedian, but as a Zen master doing comedy, because that changes the rules as I always want to push myself to the next level."

In a Tom Stade show, he likes to have four or five topics up his sleeve, "but that's not the show," he says. "I love having conversations with people and then all of a sudden we start find out about who they are, and by the end we all end up looking like heroes. It's the audience that makes the show."

His comedy conveys his easy-going disposition, his appetite for adventure, his fallibility, his carefree and positive attitude that saw him arrive in Britain with no plan but then stay because "things are way better here than they are in Canada". As in his life, he prefers risks, mischief and unpredictability in live performance.

"The thing I like in comedy is heading into the unknown, which I like more than the known, and it's good to be comfortable in the unknown. That excites me more because what it does is make every show feel special," he says. "So you didn't just go to a show that night; you saw something unique that will never be repeated."

By way of contrast, he does not warm to comedy that draws praise for being "polished". "I prefer to call it 'monologue comedy' because there's no room for that show to change, or if the audience try to change it, the comedian will jump down your throat for trying to change it," says Tom.

"For me, monologue comedy is more like a play and I don't want it to be that. With my show, for that hour, I make you look like a hero, you make me look like a hero and you go home with your girl on your arm, feeling you've had the best night of your life."

This may be an obvious question to ask, but does Tom enjoy the impact of laughter? "Of course it's a nice feeling to make people laugh," he says. "The only answer to that question is 'Yes' because, who doesn't like making people laugh? You go to a party and make someone laugh and you feel good because you're sharing something. If you make someone laugh, you've tapped into something. It's a close second to sneezing as the best feeling other than an orgasm."

Away from the stage, Tom was the co-writer for Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights and has recorded his own online sitcom with fellow comedian Daniel Sloss, intriguingly entitled M.U.F.F.

"Dan is one of my really good friends, and we were sitting there one day and decided we were going to make an indie sitcom because we were tired of waiting for someone to hand us something or waiting to be part of someone else's vision," says Tom. "So we've done this sitcom about the TV industry and you can go to muffproductions.com to watch it for free."

In Tom's words, M.U.F.F. is "a beautiful sitcom about a guy, where it shows how when you have integrity, it can be washed away really fast". "You think you can change the system, but once you're in the system, it changes you," he says.

"Our sitcom has got guns, swearing, drugs, all the things you'll never be able to see in a normal sitcom, and we made it for £10,000 with some crowd-funding that gave us £6,000 and Dan and I chucked in the rest.

"I can't thank everyone enough who made the sitcom with us, and I hope it spurs on others to make things that won't have a meerkat attached to it."

Should you be curious, "there is a reason why it's called M.U.F.F., which you'll find out in the last episode, and it'll blow you away," says Tom. "Everyone thinks it must be rude, but it's not."

What if BBC3 were to offer Stade the chance to do a sitcom? "I'd probably take it...if they said 'we want you to do a sitcom with no restrictions'," he says. "But I kind of sense that I'd go in there looking to change the system and then the system would change me."

Tom Stade presents You're Welcome at Fruitspace, Hull, on March 17. Box office: Hull, 01482 221113.