Few things can make an audience laugh quicker than a cracking one-liner. Milton Jones is a master of them, crafting enough gags to fill three national tours, numerous Radio 4 shows, a novel and regular appearances on Mock The Week, plus writing for Not Going Out, his Twitter feed and a sitcom which is in development.

“The nuts and bolts are all quite tedious really,“ he tells me on a rare day off between tour dates. “You wouldn’t neccesarily think that if you were at a comedy evening – ’this is a great laugh from beginning to end, what a great laugh it must be to come up with’, but if you listen to comedians talking it’s actually very technical.

“It’s almost like someone talking about a simultaneous equation or something – there is an answer to making the thing funny. You’ve just got to balance it in the right way, to lead the eye of the audience in the right direction so they get the surprise at the right moment.“

The 48-year-old is a prolific joke-maker. He has to be. “The problem is they take a long time to write and ten seconds to say.“

His first tour, he says, used up ten years of material. He was writing for 18 months to fill the second. His third, On The Road, took about a year and comes to Watford Colosseum next month.

“I’m not a natural storyteller,“ he says. “I like small jokes and the art of making them as short as possible, but packing as much image in those few words as possible as well.“

They’re a unique breed, these one-liner comedians, and it seems they flock together. Milton often meets up with Tim Vine, and Stewart Francis lives down his road in Richmond. They’ll often run jokes past each other to avoid unwitting plagiarism. Milton keeps files of all the jokes he’s said on TV to avoid the channel Dave dilemma of potentially having the same gag in two consecutive Mock The Week repeats.

“If you’re in a band,“ says Milton, “people want to hear the old songs, but when you’re a comedian people tend not to want to hear the same old jokes.“

Milton found the one-liner form more through necessity than design while studying drama at Middlesex University. It was there, while between acting jobs, he tried his hand at stand-up.

“Initially I was so terrified when standing in front of people,“ he admits. “I needed to get to the joke as quickly as possible – so if that’s your aim you end up with a one-liner. And then you need another one, and another one.

“I had the sort of act that either did really well or really badly. It was a lot of jokes, but I just did them as myself. That was slightly threatening – if you sound a bit middle-class in a rough area with some clever jokes, sometimes that wouldn’t work at all.

“It took me a while to find the sticky up hair and the shirts. Then they could go ’oh he’s mad, I get it’ and it became more robust.“

Trial and error made him the fine-tuned gag machine he is today. It still does. Milton regularly books himself into small theatres to test material on a live audience.

“People have described it as learning a musical instrument except you do all your practice in public. There is no other way to find your own voice than to fail.

“It’s all about being a moving object and doing stuff all the time – instead of thinking about stuff and having great ideas in theory – do them in practice and it brings you down to earth,“ he says. “It’s hit miss, hit miss, hit miss, and I keep the hits basically.“

The show features more jokes then you could ever hope to remember, plus music, pictures, props and characters because “after about 20 minutes of one-liners you can see blood coming out of people’s ears so I try and break it up,“ Milton adds.

The hard work is worth it. Milton says: “The best thing is actually performing in front of people on your own. You don’t have to rehearse with anyone, you’re in charge of what you say, no one’s putting words in your mouth and also you get all the laughs. It’s the rawest and most rewarding form.“

Milton Jones is at Watford Colosseum on Friday, March 1 at 8pm. Details: 0845 075 3993