Lloyd Langford on Fun and Sustenance

Naturally shy, Lloyd Langford admits that he's “not really any kind of alpha male,” which might make him seem an unlikely stand-up. But the 32-year-old Welshman conveys an endearing naïvety on stage; a strangely sage kind of foolishness, preferring “to play [at] knowing less than I do. That way you can surprise people.”

He'll unquestionably catch some off-guard with his new show, Fun and Sustenance, developed at the Phoenix Fringe in London before arriving at this year's Glasgow International Comedy Festival. Focusing on pleasure, it's racier than his usual repertoire, with “more sex in it.”

“Anecdotal, not audience participation,” he clarifies. “When I started doing stand-up I avoided doing ruder stuff, as I didn't think I had the skill. And also, who wants to hear an 18-year-old talk about sex? But now I'm a bit older, it feels like I can broach it. It's very self-deprecating. I'm not like Russell Brand, out in the audience with a cordless mic, foraging for vagina.”

A true blues aficionado, Langford will admit to a melancholic streak. “But then most stand-ups are probably a curious mixture of incredible confidence and crippling self-doubt,” he ventures. Besides, the blues “can also be very joyous and life-affirming … I find it hard to get upset about the concept of infidelity when it's referred to as 'doing the monkey'.”

With a sideline writing for other comics on television, Langford's first regular pay cheque was contributing to Simon Amstell's script on Never Mind The Buzzcocks. He couldn't smuggle too many obscure blues references into the long-running panel show, but he succeeded with erotic fiction. “I never thought I'd get paid for writing smut for Lethal Bizzle,” he marvels.

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Preferring to work closely with the comic he's writing for, he recalls Frankie Boyle's guest hosting of the music quiz fondly, “writing jokes that I thought went too far but then Frankie wanted them to be pushed even further.

“It was a vicarious pleasure. I could never get away with saying it but Frankie can. He doesn't deliver his jokes so much as drop them on your fucking head and then just leave you to deal with the aftermath.”

Alongside QI and Russell Howard's Good News, his highest profile television appearances to date have been as the regular fall guy on knockabout panel show Ask Rhod Gilbert, which helped him “develop a higher threshold for embarrassment.

“When your job that week involves being covered in waxing strips and then wrestling with Greg Davies on national television, you have to overcome your shyness.”

He and Gilbert might be reunited soon, and as brothers no less, if the latter's long-gestating sitcom finally makes it to television. Langford played the amiable, not-so-bright Emrys to Gilbert's gruff, combustible nutter in the latter's 2008 Radio 2 pilot about returning to his backward hometown and family. Following years of procrastination, Gilbert and his co-writer wife Sian Harries are now developing Back To Llanbobl with Steve Coogan's production company Baby Cow, responsible for such hits as Gavin & Stacey, Uncle and Alan Partridge's Mid-Morning Matters.

“I'd love to do it again!” Langford enthuses. “I think him and Sian wrote the character with me in mind. Which is good and bad if you're familiar with him.”

At various times, Langford has been Gilbert's tour support, tenant and flatmate. And they remain close. Returning from performing at the World Buskers Festival in New Zealand recently, Langford was “a bit jet-lagged wandering around a shop and I saw a pair of boots I thought he'd really like, so I bought them for him.

“That's how I'd describe our relationship. Close enough to impulse purchase shoes for!”

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Lloyd Langford: Fun and Sustenance (work-in-progress), The Stand, Glasgow, 20 March, 5.30pm, £8/£7