When it comes to well-dressed comedians there are few that can match Simon Evans. Onstage he is immaculately tailored. You feel you are in safe hands when someone this perfectly groomed is in front of you.

Appearances can be deceiving though: “There's a bit with a candle in the set at the moment, and I've already got a couple of spots of melted wax on some jackets,” he confesses. Not that the audience would notice, but he pays close attention to detail whether it is clothing material or comedy material.

It is morning in Norwich following a sold out performance of his show Staring at the Sun at the Playhouse and even though he’s in country casuals he still looks like he has stepped out of a high class menswear catalogue.

A google of the phrase Staring at the Sun reveals it to have been the title of an album by 1980s funksters Level 42, but Evans' inspiration goes back somewhat further. “Plato says we're all prisoners in a cave watching shadows on the wall and thinking that's reality, but you have to see things by the light of the sun to fully understand them."

There are also more contemporary reasons for the title too: “It coalesced from a number of different things. One was a picture of Donald Trump on the balcony of the White House during a solar eclipse. Everyone was told to wear glasses, but Trump doesn't. He doesn't stare at the sun for very long, but I just thought this recklessness was very...Trumpian."

Among other topics he tackles are AI and whether we are living in a computer simulation. It's about what is real. The title makes complete sense. Even though Evans’ agent thought he had chosen it for personal reasons. “He thought it was because I always look like I’m squinting!”

The Brighton-based comic has been a stand-up for over 25 years but feels he had a renaissance around 2010. "I'd had kids and maybe I hadn't been as ambitious as I should have been and just played the club gigs. But I supported Lee Mack on tour and that really rebooted my career. People would often say to me, 'oh, we saw you with Lee Mack and we thought you were great and that's why we're here.'

Evans' masterplan worked. "I think a lot of comics assume that you need to be on Live at the Apollo to sell tickets, but actually the people who go to live gigs, they're quite a small fraction of the demographic that watch stand-up on TV, and tour support is a much better way to market yourself. Don't be shy, it's important to get out there."

From there he started to do full-length solo shows again. Work of the Devil in 2019 took things up a notch with his discovery that he was “donor-conceived” – and shared his biological father with dozens, possibly hundreds of half siblings. ‘That was the first time I really embraced some vulnerability, some intimacy with the audience – and I enjoyed it.” His last show, Have We Met? was about getting older: "Reaching an age where you start losing a few friends. And children growing up, which is not a bereavement, exactly, but it's a recognition that you have passed a certain landmark in your life. You know, there are only so many trees you go past on the river before you start to hear the sound of the waterfall."

One strand of Staring at the Sun picks up this theme. He suggests that as we age the body starts demanding upgrades and getting software updates it doesn't want: "The prostate for men is an object that just becomes a menace after a certain age. It presses against the bladder and you never get a good night's sleep again. On that front I am a fully paid up transhumanist."

Evans is not just one of our most sartorially stylish stand-ups, he is also clearly one of our most thoughtful, finding the funny side of the modern world, wondering if the things we consider to be progress really are progress. Perhaps we lose as much as we gain.

“I drive from gig to gig and I cannot conceive how anyone was ever capable of doing so before satnav. So that is progress, but it has also definitely weakened my capacity for reading road signs or memorising routes. And my car has those parking cameras and now I don't think I'm capable of parking a car using mirrors anymore. Little by little I’m being phased out."

Despite the travails of travel Evans is enjoying life. His tour is selling very well and he is a regular on the enjoyably quirky BBC Radio 4 series One Person Found This Helpful, hosted by Frank Skinner, in which guests try to identify what item is for sale by online reviews.

In fact Evans co-devised the show. “I posted a tweet about an Amazon review and Jason Hazeley, who is a very successful writer, got in touch and said 'I think there might be a radio show in this.' Within a couple of months it was commissioned."

He would have liked to have hosted it, but accepts that a bigger name was needed and adds that Skinner is brilliant. “He is absolutely superb. He's so funny and warm and quick and genial. But also, what's nice about it, is it's not political. It's just gently life-affirming. It's about “what fools these mortals be”. A third series will air later this year.

On the subject of politics Evans is one of the few openly right-of-centre comedians on the circuit, but he doesn’t bring his politics into his live shows. “It's not a topic I feel inclined to make too many jokes about. When you have a one-man platform onstage that can so easily turn into a rant. Though when I'm the only right-leaning figure on Radio 4's The News Quiz where you have a left-wing host and three left-wing guests that's a slightly different dynamic. There it's licensed."

He is not sure, however, whether putting politics into his act would even change anything. "I don't think anyone changes people's hearts and minds. If Mark Steel does ninety minutes about the inequities of the Tories, he can reliably expect that his audience already agree with him – that’s what they’ve come to hear. I would rather talk about the larger issues about being human. The nature of reality itself."

Evans prefers to wax lyrical about the human condition in his trademark intelligent fashion. And talking of fashion, what is his secret to looking so good onstage? Does he have a valet or travel with his own personal Corby trouser press? The answer is fiendishly simple. "A well cut suit will survive a bit of crumpling. And it sets your mind right. It's like dressing smartly for the office. It's very rare that anyone looks wrong in a suit."

Simon Evans is currently on tour. For dates and tickets click here: https://thesimonevans.com/