ALUN Cochrane enjoys letting his thoughts wander. No wonder the Mock The Week panellist calls his latest tour Alun Cochrane Is A Daydreamer (At Night).

“I quite like explanatory titles to let you know that you’re in the company of a man who can spend the day thinking about spag bol. I just think it’s good to tell people that they’ll be spending their time with someone whose mind wanders,” says the Scottish-born Yorkshireman, who parks his Skoda in York on Sunday to play the Hyena Lounge Comedy Club.

“I think it’s the ultimate defence mechanism to all that’s going on in the world right now,” he says. “Like I describe looking out the window as the holiday you don’t have to queue for – and looking out the window can sort you out.”

Alun’s latest stand-up show has passed through the Edinburgh festival hothouse already, honing his dour comic observations for the autumn ahead while attracting his usual quota of praise for being “effortlessly funny”.

The description has begun to irk him. “I’m fed up with people saying that it’s effortless, when it’s harder than that,” he says. “All comedians re-write material in the building of a show; I did that after every gig for this one.

“My wife and son would be asleep and I’d have a hot drink or a glass of wine in the kitchen, play back the show I’d just done on the Dictaphone and then add to the show for the next night.”

The trick with comedy is the element of surprise, suggests Alun.

“A show has to be full of surprises, so that someone has one image in their head and then the comedian changes it, and the faster you change it and the more you change it, the funnier it is,” he says.

To challenge the perception of his being naturally humorous, no matter what he is saying, 34-year-old Alun has set himself a challenge. “I’ve already started the next stuff I’ll be doing, writing proper jokes to see if I can tell them,” he says.

Yet for all his underplaying of his own comic gifts, Alun admits to enjoying the art of making comedy flow, taking Billy Connolly, Jerry Seinfeld, Frank Skinner and “a dash of Alan Bennett for his turn of phrase” as his inspirations.

“Maybe I have a fairly simple palate and like to know what I’m being offered when I go to a show, but I also like being at the back of a room and watching a comic where you can’t quite see the joins and it all just seems to happen,” he says.

He could of course be talking about his own act there, and certainly he is when he says: “I think you start to realise you can save everyone a little time and effort if you can go from one funny bit to the next by the quickest route, then we can all barrel along. It makes it easier if you get your lines really battened down.”

And so, in the words of Nicholas Barber’s Edinburgh festival review in the Independent this summer, the consequent comic appeal of Cochrane is that “it seems as if he’s being funny just by being himself”. Effortless, you could say!

“I think my idea of comedy is pretty much a funny bloke being funny. It’s not really an intelligence test involving doing jokes about Jean-Paul Sartre,” he says.

However you define it, comedy works for Alun Cochrane. “I’m not productive in any other arena,” he says. “So I’m turning a weakness into a strength by doing shows and TV” – and by daydreaming too.

• Alun Cochrane plays Hyena Lounge Comedy Club, Basement Bar, City Screen, York, on Sunday at 7.30pm; tickets cost £10, concessions £8, on 0871 704 2054 or on the door from 7pm. Further shows: The Library, Leeds, on November 10 and Mirth Control Comedy Club, Pocklington Arts Centre, on January 28.