King of the one liner Gary Delaney is in Weymouth next month to make us laugh - with no political bent. He tells Joanna Davis why he thinks the simplicity of pure humour is what we all need right now.

COMEDIAN Gary Delaney is used to being known as 'Mr Sarah Millican'.

In a coupling in which the other half has become one of the biggest names in comedy with a BAFTA nomination for her TV show, Gary is far from second fiddle.

His one-liner style comedy offers a refreshing change from the overwhelmingly politicised stand-up scene out there at the moment.

In Gary's words - 'everything is a bit fractious at the moment and I'm having no part in it.'

Instead, the Solihull born and raised comic, who married Sarah Millican in late 2013, promises to cram 200 jokes an hour into his sets. They can vary from schoolboy humour to dad jokes, to more X-rated humour not suited to a family newspaper like the Dorset Echo!

"There's a bit of escapism in it," Gary says. "I have a rule in this show - no political jokes - no Brexit jokes. I don't really care about the audience being left leaning or right leaning, leavers or remainers. I don't like this idea of comics getting on stage and telling the audience off. I'm not here to air my opinions."

Gary, a regular on TV comedy show Mock the Week, just has one aim. To make people laugh. A lot.

"When people come up to me after the show and say 'my face aches from laughing I know I have done my job. The way I see it is if you have a plumber in you want them to fix the shower, you don't want them to be quoting Jean Paul Satre at you."

Gary is a regular guest on the BBC's Mock the Week and has also written extensively for TV and radio, including 8 Out Of 10 Cats and 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown.

His Gagster's Paradise tour has sold so many tickets that he added a run of extra dates to it - extending it until March 2020. And Gary thinks his brand of humour is just what the doctor ordered.

"These are strange times we're in at the moment and it seems like it's a bit like in the 1930s in the Depression when people turned to musicals to forget their troubles. They want to get about everything going on and just laugh for two hours."

With so many jokes stuffed into a set, how on earth do you remember them all, I ask?

"There are two things," he tells me.

"You have to know what you're planning to say - but nobody else does. If you make a mess of it, as long as you keep moving forward, no-one else will know. Part of it is a confidence trick."

And the second thing Gary confides to me is a technique I wish I knew when I was revising for exams many years ago.

"I don't really a really good memory," he confesses. "I use a memory system and the one I use goes back to the time of the Greeks and the Romans. Because they couldn't read and write they learned everything through a memory system. I have a mental picture to remember each joke. But some of the jokes are quite rude so the pictures can be quite interesting!

"Say if I have 200 jokes, I have 200 pictures in my mind. I take them and I scatter them around the house.

"The first joke is placed on my bedside cabinet so it's a journey going through the house from the bedroom to the outside front door. The route I take to pick up the pictures is fluid and can vary. That's how it works. I learnt these techniques six or seven years ago. It works because there's nowhere you're more familiar with than your own home. If you had to wake up in the middle of the night and you want to go to the bathroom without putting the light on and disturbing your partner, we all know the way without having to put the light on. You know exactly where everything is."

The memory system Gary uses is from the author Josh Foer, he tells me. Foer wrote bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein, drawing on a surprising cultural history of remembering.

And while Gary is a comedian in such demand being married to another comedian in equal demand, he has to make sure he is back home - his basis for that clever memory system - as often as possible.

He tells me: "We have to plan as much time ahead as possible to see each other. It's a bit like it was before mobile phones. You have to make plans and stick to them. Usually me and Sarah have what we call the 'comic's weekend', which is Monday and Tuesday night. It's the best time to go out and eat on a Monday afternoon - it's always so quiet!"

*Gary Delaney - Gagster's Paradise, Weymouth Pavilion, Saturday, August 11. Contact the box office for tickets.

There will be another chance to see Gary perform when he takes Gagster's Paradise to Lighthouse, Poole, on Wednesday, November 6.

Gary's Gags

*The young couple next door to me have recently made a sex tape, I mean obviously they don't know that yet.

*I think the hardest part of making skimmed milk must be throwing the cows across the lake.

*I like to annoy my Israeli flatmate by giving him any post that's just addressed 'to the occupier'.

*I'm not saying I'm unlucky but when I tried to buy a sofa at DFS the sale had finished.

*One time there was a fire at a voodoo doll factory and 10,000 people died.

*I've written a letter to the Royal Mail to complain about my post being stolen. To make sure they see it, I've put it inside a birthday card.

*I’m a lot more sporty than I look, in fact I picked up a little niggle at the gym the other day, I mean he pronounces it Nigel.

*Every Christmas day we always have pigs in blankets, or as you probably call it, relatives sleeping in the spare room.

*The other day a woman described me as a bit of a looker, well 'voyeur' is the actual word she used.

*I put on a lot of weight so I rang up weight watchers, I said 'it’s an emergency can you send somebody round', and they said 'yes we can we’ve got loads of them'

*I was actually thrown out of Weight Watchers for making sarcastic comments at the weekly weigh in. As you can imagine I accepted the decision with huge grace, because they threw her out as well

*My girlfriend's dog died and to cheer her up I bought her an identical one, she was livid, ‘what am I going to do with two dead dogs?’

*In Cornwall the marriage guidance service is called Related.

*I went to buy a Christmas tree and the guy said 'are you putting it up yourself?' I said 'no I was thinking the living room.'

*I always worry when a woman sees me naked for the first time she's just going to scream and run out of the park

*I’ve got the memory of an elephant, I remember one time i went to the zoo and I saw an elephant.

*The President of France said this week that English speakers were arrogant in their refusal to learn other languages, at least I think that’s what he said. But it all just sounded like haw he saw he haw he haw.

*It’s been a tough week, I bought myself a memory foam mattress and now it’s trying to blackmail me.

*I was in a fancy lingerie shop and I said are these knickers satin, they said no they're new.

*I tell you what always catches my eye, short people with umbrellas

*I took a poll recently and 100% of the people were quite annoyed that their tent had fallen down.

*We’ve got two kids, Jane and Emma, sadly they do both get bullied at school, I can’t make it stop but I can help them learn how to rise above it, so the other day I said to them “look boys..”

*I think it’s sad the word legend has been devalued from pulling a sword from a stone to unexpectedly returning with crisps.