Approaching Paul Sinha involves a complex obstacle course of labels and definitions. He is the world’s only gay Bengali GP turned stand-up comedian. Yet he defies any of the clichés that mix of labels may have created in your mind. For one thing, he’s about as camp as a tax return. A Channel 4 commissioning editor flatly refused to believe he was gay, which presumably cost him an otherwise guaranteed Friday-night slot. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, short of a rippling six-pack. He’s also a huge football fan, which isolates him somewhat from the gay community: “Most gay men I know think Man City is some kind of sex resort.”

He chooses to high-light his Bengali roots, rather than performing as a generic Asian or Indian comic, because he’s proud to point out that Bengalis have always considered themselves a little smarter than the rest of the subcontinent. They enjoy art-house movies from Calcutta instead of the razzle-dazzle of Bollywood. “I grew up sitting through movies where a housewife made deep life choices over the course of three hours,” he says. “I think Goodness Gracious Me slightly queered the pitch. They came from Punjabi and Gujarati backgrounds. A lot of their jokes would have been hysterical to people from that background, but went right over my head. I prefer personal stories as the basis for my humour.”

Thus his comedy is thoughtful and complex, yet dotted with sharp one-liners – about the status of gays in Hinduism, for instance: “Just below a leper, just above somebody who doesn’t understand cricket.” His 2006 Edinburgh show, Saint or Sinha?, traced his fraught romantic life with such humour that it was nominated for an if.comedy award. His touch was deft and light, so anecdotes about being threatened by a drunken squaddie he desperately fancied, or noting the irony of being an undercover gay man on a rugby stag-do and earning the label “poof” for not eating enough curry, became charming rather than anguished. His new show, King of the World, takes that charm and raises it to the life-affirming. Sinha wanders through the joyous moments in his life, from a television quiz he starred in as a 20-year-old to a Las Vegas holiday he took when the Iraq war was at its height. Although he recounts being attacked in a Glasgow kebab shop, he makes it sound like schoolboy slapstick, rather than turning it into a searing attack on racist Britain.

“My stories are personal, and I don’t want to make out that I’m a victim,” he explains. “I’m not. To do race material, it kind of helps if you’ve been a victim of racism, and I can’t pretend I have. The biggest factor in my life was the middle-class, educated aspirations of my parents, much more than race or sexuality.” Sinha’s parents moved to the UK in 1969, and he was born in Luton a year later. Both were doctors, and his route to medical school was a given. Having arrived at St George’s Hospital, he started dabbling in stand-up and managed to combine it with the insane hours a junior doctor works. Just.

“When I look back on the first year, I think, ‘If I’d had three really bad gigs in a row, I’d have given up.’ But considering how bad I actually was in my first year, it’s surprising how many gigs went really well. It shows you don’t need that much to please a crowd, because there were pretty terrible jokes. But it was something to impress people with at parties, and stopped them telling me about the shooting pains in their arm when they found out I was a doctor.”

He still practises, and reckons that only about 1% of his patients know he’s a stand-up – but he may have to reconsider if his comedy status begins to rise. “A blogger wrote a review of Saint or Sinha? that said: ‘Great jokes, not sure I’d want my GP telling them.’ And I can see that,” he grins.

He is disappointed that, in the 12 years since he started, there hasn’t been an increase in gay men watching comedy. “I don’t fit into the category they choose their entertainment from. There are three gay clubs: Comedy Camp, Screamers and Bent Double.As you can imagine, they’re expecting a certain style of comedy.” But, he reflects, that may ultimately be good for his material. “The gay thing is interesting,” he muses. “People don’t mind, as long as you don’t tell them what you get up to. People say there are no taboos in comedy, but I don’t think that’s true. I’ve never seen anyone make material about watersports work, for instance . . . ” And he gives a mischievous laugh you could almost call camp.

For tour dates, see www.paulsinha.com

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