Shazia Mirza has nothing to fear, comedy audiences being pussycats in comparison to the kids she used to teach in inner-city London: “At least they don’t threaten to kill you, or not so far anyway,” she muses.

In fact, her story alone – Asian girl in strict Muslim family who’s expected to grow up and be a good wife, instead turns to comedy, via teaching, and goes global – means you can see where her resilience comes from.

This need to prove herself continues to spur Shazia on, on stage, in her Guardian column and on TV, and as a result the 39-year-old is almost impossible to get hold of. This month alone she has visited India, the Caribbean and Norway, selling out in all, and is now preparing to embark on the UK leg of her tour, strangely not something she particularly relishes.

“Oxford, is so middle-class and intellectual and the audience is always full of professors,” she sighs. How can you tell? I ask. “They have white bouffant hair, glasses and wear linen and sandals in the middle of winter —what else can they be?” Fair point.” So it will be very nice, tea and cake in the interval, that sort of thing,” she says disparagingly.

Don’t take it personally: the UK is Shazia’s least favourite place to tour and she would much rather be entertaining abroad, which begs the question why. “England is the hardest place in the world for me to perform, my own country. I have always found it difficult, as if I have to prove something here. “Everywhere else people just accept me and judge me for who I am and what I do on stage, but here they want me to be a particular thing and talk about certain subjects. “They always have expectations.”

Like what? “Being the voice of Muslim women or Asians, or women in general, they want me to be what they want me to be. So if I start talking about Primark, they sigh and say ‘why is she talking about that? What a waste’.”

The problem is of course that when Shazia first started out, that was her selling point — she was such a new voice, a female Brummie Asian who wanted to get up on stage and tell everyone what that was like. It’s how she initially stood out from the crowd. “Everything I did was multiplied 200 times, it was like being under a magnifying glass,” she explains.

Her new UK show Cuckooland, however, is different, and the result of a family friend asking how long Shazia was going to keep up her comedy career. “When I told him I wanted to be like Joan Rivers and still appear on stage at 60 or 70, he said I was deluded and living in Cloud Cuckooland. “So it’s about being deluded, but properly deluded, because it’s the deluded people that make things happen and get things done. I’m sure Nelson Mandela was deluded and the man that ran the 100m in 10 seconds in the Olympics, he must have been deluded.

“But I also want to separate the really deluded from the semi-deluded, like the people on X-Factor, because they deter people from the properly deluded, whom we need.”

As soon as Shazia talks about her work, rather than herself, her apathy and despondency disappear and you can almost see the blood coursing through her veins. It’s certainly what makes her tick, wherever she is.

“I love performing, I love my life and travel a lot and listen to people’s conversations and I don’t care what people think, as long as they still come and see me anyway. Because after all, it’s comedy not Question Time.”

And the word is spreading, as far and wide as comedy deserts like India, which was a whole new ball game for Shazia. “I sold out there, and even though comedy is just taking off, when I came on stage the audience at the front actually said to me: ‘I can’t believe you’re a woman’ so I talk to them about why I haven’t got a husband, because that’s what they want to know. It’s what I used to talk about but on a deeper level than when I first started.”

And have her parents accepted that their world-famous comedienne of a daughter isn’t ready to settle down yet? “No, marrying me off is all they care about really. “And instead here I am having to entertain people all the time and get paid for it,” she smiles. Perhaps all this proving herself is finally paying off.

Shazia Mirza plays The North Wall, Summertown, Tomorrow (Friday).

Call 01865 319450 or contact thenorthwall.com