Mention Oxford and comedian Dara O’Briain lights up. “Solero man,” he shouts excitedly in his Irish brogue. “Oxford was where we found Solero man, comedy gold.”

“Comedy gold” is one of Dara’s favourite sayings because it’s what makes him tick. When you’re as clever as he is, thinking up retorts on TV’s Mock the Week and starring in Three Men in a Boat, churning out the same routine every night would bore him to tears, so instead he enrols the audience to help get the party started.

Which is where Solero man comes in. Having singled one chap out at the New Theatre last year, he asked what the man did. “It turns out he invented the Tropical Solero ice cream, which brought the house down,” Dara says, grinning. “Comedy gold. And then Solero man said he didn’t invent it on his own, he headed a team. I told him Edmund Hillary headed a team...” and so the banter goes on, and you can see how Dara carries the crowd in a wave of hysterical euphoria engulfing Solero man in his wake.

And that’s why people love going to see the 37-year-old live. They become part of the show.

“Well everyone’s got one story they tell at parties and I hope those are the stories that people tell at my show,” Dara explains. “And last night in Halifax I struck comedy gold again. We were talking about winning things and a man put up his hand and said he’d won a Caribbean cruise on the TV game show 3-2-1 but his family had some undiscovered form of tuberculosis and weren’t allowed to leave their cabin for the entire holiday.” And Dara guffaws. “Can you imagine?”

“So what I do is essentially curating, getting to the gist of the story, hauling out the point, and then recreating them badly and teasing people with the logic of what they did, so that I get the laugh but they get the applause.

“Because if you are reciting the same lines every night you feel like an actor and I’m not an actor. So it’s at least 30 minutes of them in every live show.” The rest is Dara’s biting stand-up wit which sells out everywhere he goes.

So he prefers a story to a heckle then? “I rarely get a heckle these days. That tends to be in pubs and clubs which are always predictably negative and usually quite jarring. It’s just legal bear-baiting which means you do ask yourself if what you’re doing is actually that much fun.

“But recently I was in the middle of a routine and a man shouted out, ‘Save yourself’. I must say I enjoyed the pause,” Dara laughs. “I mean save yourself from what? I was talking about Take That at the time,” he says.

The good news is, that rather than keeping all this “comedy gold” for the theatre’s audiences alone, Dara has now written a book about his observances of the English, using up all his favourite anecdotes and recollections from the tours over the years. His book Tickling the English is the result and is a hilarious if unexpected read.

“Reading the reviews on Amazon is my guilty pleasure,” Dara admits. “One said, ‘How can he live like this?’, so it must be a good insight into this circus life. Another said, ‘This is a book of statistics,” he recites, pleased as punch at the reactions. “So the book is part-tour, part-travelogue and a good look at England.

“But all comedy is a travelogue in some way,” he muses. “You know, things that happen along the way, I did this and you did that. But the book’s not a biography – I think people have as much interest in reading one as I have in writing one.”

This comes as no surprise because Dara is notoriously closed about his private life, once saying: “I am currently engaged in a lifelong project to have a successful career that never involves using your private life in any way.”

But if you want to see him for yourself, he’s in Oxford next week, appearing at the New Theatre on Monday and Wednesday with his new live show, and at Waterstones with his new book on Wednesday.

So does he like the touchy-feely aspect of the book signings then? “People tend not to queue up to punch me. And I’m not going to be a martyr about it, I’m not going to Afghanistan or anything, but you do yearn for a bit of banter – although I did meet a brother and sister yesterday called Luke and Leia who had never made the Star Wars connection. Can you imagine? Comedy gold.”