If you ask Reginald D Hunter a real question he will, in his words, reply with "real shit". If, on the other hand, you ask something banal like about the difference between stand-up and screen work, you might get a thoroughly deserved ribbing.
"In one I’m sitting, and in stand-up I’m… standing up," the comedian tells The Herald.
"I think that’s the first and most striking difference.
"And, of course, if you’ve only seen me on television and you come and see my live show I won’t be sitting there with four other people. It will just be me - standing - and I’ll probably be talking more because on TV you have to let other people speak sometimes.
"In my show, I’m standing erect and I say whatever the hell I like, as much as I want."
Fair enough.
The comic will bring his new show, The Man Who Could See Through Shit, to the Glasgow Comedy Festival on March 28 and 29, and promises 'rowdy good fun'.
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He says: "It’s a bit of an homage to my mother, she used to say ‘it’s easy to see through shit, the hard part is pretending that you haven’t’.
“I feel like as I get older I’m in that position, and I wonder if the world is changing as fast as it seems to be or is it just that I’m getting old and all change freaks me out?
"I think I took a blow to my funny bone during the lockdown and I feel like I’ve just got back to full funny, like a repressed funny is coming out right now.
“When you get to be a little bit of an older dude people don’t get as mad when you say certain things. If you say stuff about trans people or Jews they’ll take you down, I guess, but just about everything else when you’re an old dude and you say it people will just be like, ‘ah well he’s an old dude’.
"I think playtime is over now. Post-Covid grief is over, we have the right to be mad about shit again. I feel like I’m kind of revving my engine again.”
Though he's lived in the UK for more than 20 years, Mr Hunter keeps a keen eye on his birth nation - and there's plenty to be mad about.
On the day he speaks to The Herald, incumbent president Joe Biden will be described in a court filing as 'an elderly man with poor memory'. In trying to defend himself in a press conference, he confuses Egypt with Mexico.
Challenger Donald Trump, almost certain to be the Republican nominee as he aims for a second crack at the White House, is mired in legal issues and has displayed mental struggles of his own.
Mr Hunter sighs: "Some people are saying we’re getting ready to have our last election ever.
“I look at it and… it’s bleak. To think that these are the only two people qualified to be president of the United States right now? A country with 360 million people and these two people right here are our choices?
“I could go into more specific detail about each candidate’s platform or performance but everything worth saying about these cats has been said.
“The Republicans are going to do what Republicans do, it doesn’t matter who Trump really is or what he says, they are dug in.
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“I was re-watching an episode of The Wire with a friend of mine recently, it was the fourth series with the schoolchildren and no wonder our public school system is the way it is at the moment.
“I’m funnier about this on stage than I am during the daytime. America, I fear, has become an untenable mess at the moment.
“I try to remind myself though that the news doesn’t cover truly good things. There are probably three times as many good things going on in the world but it doesn’t make news because it’s not bad or sensational."
As Mr Hunter sees it, things aren't a whole lot better in the UK.
While the Conservative government appears to be on its last legs, enthusiasm for the presumptive Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in short supply.
Mr Hunter says: "Don’t even get me started.
“Basically what Labour did was they let themselves get infiltrated by right-wingers - then they let the right-wingers vote them out of their own party.
“It’s the same kind of messed up thing as America but the scale is just different, that’s all.
“This is the first interview I’ve given in a minute and I forget to be light and bouncy and fun – you ask me a real question, I’m going to tell you some real shit.”
Mr Hunter's work takes in everything from racial politics to a blistering, brilliant evisceration of Sex and the City 2 . This will be his eighth stand-up tour and, despite lockdown, the comedy pump remains primed.
He says: "The news remains a perennial source of inspiration and things to comment on, but I find if you just know enough people eventually someone is going to come up to you and say some wild shit.
“I used to do this joke where I used to say ‘you know when somebody tells you something f****d up but you act like it’s normal so they’ll tell you more? Oh yeah, no, sure, putting socks in a toaster where’d you get that from?’.
“I feel like I’ve lost an area of cross-pollination since the lockdowns, I don’t get to socialise as much as I once did.
“But the more you’re around people, something’s going to happen. It always does.
“It’s weird to have to dig into my mind about my inspiration because right now I’ve kind of been on a joke-writing roll, I’ve got some new ones I can’t wait to get to stage with.
“You can go weeks and months without anything dropping from the heavens and you think ‘shit, have I written my last good joke?’.
“Then you get five or six in a row, bam-bam-bam, and you feel reloaded.”
Tickets for Reginald D Hunter's The Man Who Could See Through Shit are available here
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