Why the imp in Ken Dodd will find him atop the rainbow of comedy in York

"Another tour of the greatest county in the country," enthuses Ken, as he looks ahead to returning to the Grand Opera House, in York, on July 10 with his Happiness Show. "It's the atmosphere I love. The audience is right there. All theatres have a 'thing' about them, a personality, and the Opera House has a great personality. A building only becomes a theatre when you have people in there, and there's a wonderful audience at York."

Now 88 and still presenting a show that carries an advance warning of an approximate running time of 300 minutes – five hours in old money – Ken remains a devotee of traditional performance skills. "Variety comes in for criticism today but it really means a variety of skills and where you have those skills, you have a jewel of a turn," he says.

Music, for example, has always played its part in Ken's shows. "We always had a lot of music in our house: there was no lock on the bathroom door," he says. "My mother played piano and my father played clarinet, saxophone and bass.

"I was in the church choir; only they found out where the noise was coming from! I did if for a year and we had a really good choir master who taught me how to project, and he used to take us to the Shakespeare Theatre of Varieties, where I would see all sorts of comedians; men in baggy trousers and red noses; Welshmen, Scots, the English and the Irish."

The seeds of a love of performing were sewn. "Once you've got your first laugh, it's such a wonderful, wonderful thrill," says Ken. "I always say it's the happiest job in the world, seeing happy faces, but it's always a gamble when you have only have 30 seconds to build a bridge with the audience. When you perform, you have to be part orator, part comedian, part actor, part mimic."

Ken Dodd: "the happiest job in the world"

Ken feels he was lucky from the start. "My father was a great joke teller and you always want to mimic your dad, don't you," he says, before broadening his flow of thoughts on humorous characteristics. "People in Liverpool have a wonderful ability to speak in pictures, and one of the best comic skills is not just to tell a story but to show it. I do a lot of one-liner patter but there's also nothing better than telling a story."

People ask Ken if humour has changed over his long, long career since turning professional in 1954, and his answer is No. "We still laugh at the same things. Aristophanes, Aristotle, wrote about the same things: men, women, power, money," he says.

"It's the audience's expectations and the boundaries that have changed. The Lord Chancellor's office used to put a blue pencil through your script for the summer season, taking out things they didn't want you to talk about, such as MPs, for example, so you had to send in your script about three months before the season started."

Ken still loves coming up with new material. "That's the most exciting thing about being a comedian: you keep dreaming up new concepts and new ideas and you use every audience like a workbench, trying things out on them," he says.

At 88, the show will go on for Ken. "I'm a jester and my job is to make people happy. Laughter is like a rainbow, where you stay at the top and it's bright, not at the bottom, where you find comedians who are clever but they aren't funny and they don't have the comic imp in them.

"Down there, it's all the dark stuff, the satire, where you're picking at the nation's sores and talking about miserable things. Why would you do that when life is an hilarious experience? Live for laughter, I say."

Ken Dodd's Happiness Show, Grand Opera House, York, Sunday, July 10, 7pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york