IRISH storyteller and stand-up comic Tommy Tiernan has not forgotten his last visit to the Harrogate Comedy Festival.

“I was put in the boot of a car at Leeds Bradford Airport, driven to Harrogate and told to tell jokes at gunpoint,” he says, “and then driven back to the airport.”

Such recollections should be taken with a pinch of salt, much like the title of his latest show when he returns to Harrogate Theatre tonight for his 2012 festival gig.

Why call it Poot, Tommy? “I wanted a word that I couldn’t understand and yet drew some surrealist comfort from it, and Poot satisfied all those requirements. I don’t know of it’s a word or a sound, but it sounds like it should be a village near Antwerp,” he says.

“It doesn’t mean anything in particular. It’s just a starting-off point and a conclusion – and I don’t even mention the word.”

By way of contrast, the name of his previous show, Crooked Man, was significant. “I wanted something that inspired me every time I thought about it,” says Tommy. “It came from that saying that it’s better to be a river than a canal, as a canal is man-made and mannered, whereas rivers can be winding and crooked and I wanted my ‘riverness’ to come out.

“But at the same time as that canal type of thinking, there’s also that huge English surreal thing too, like Monty Python or Shooting Stars, which just delight in nonsense, so you have the straightness but there’s also the rebellion against that.”

Tommy enjoys the uncertainty of thinking “Am I on my own on this?” and then testing them out those thoughts an audience.

“It’s a relief when you leave the comfort of your own mind to engage with people,” he says. “That’s magnified when you leave your own country and go to a town that you’ve never heard of and is impossibly grand: I’m very conscious when I walk around Harrogate of my otherness, so for me to talk intimately and make a point of contact is thrilling.”

It might be tempting to cast Irishman Tiernan as the outsider looking in, but he demurs. “I prefer to see myself as the outsider looking out,” he says. “It’s that notion of being the guy who’s half dressed and emaciated in the crow’s nest on the ship of fools.

“My job is to be in the clouds looking for what’s out there, in the pale cream shirt that’s ripped to shreds, shouting out what I see, when schoolteachers and firemen are too busy working.”

Tiernan’s comedy is at once destructive yet healing. “At the end of the show, people have to walk out having had a good time, and whatever earthquakes may have occurred should be seen as liberating rather than threatening,” he says.

“Whereas a comedian like Jerry Sadowitz might like to see you walking home injured from the earthquake, I want people to think it was a rather nice earthquake.”

• Tommy Tiernan: Poot; Harrogate Comedy Festival, Harrogate Theatre, tonight, 8pm. Box office: 01423 502116 or harrigatetheatre.co.uk