“My general rule: I have to be able to say it in front of my mum and dad”

When Suzi Ruffell started writing her latest show, Keeping It Classy, she intended to examine the world she now inhabits – somewhere between the working-class family she was born into in Portsmouth, and her arty, middle-class life in hipster east London. But then unexpected events intervened.

She speaks as rapidly off stage as she does on it – “I just keep talking until someone tells me to stop,” she says laughing – and her thoughts move fluently from one subject to another without pause. “So much happened in my life,” she says. “There were two deaths in my family in quick succession and I went through a big, messy break-up.”

Those emotional events fed into Keeping It Classy. “It was supposed to be entirely about class – how I had become this avocado-munching, yoga-practising Londoner, but when I began to write it, it also became about how I was recalibrating my life. The deaths really affected my family, and I was with my girlfriend for four years and we were engaged; I thought my life was going in one direction, and then that changed.”

Suzi, 32, comes from a close family – “large, loud, rough-and-tumble, a bit dodge in the nicest possible way”. Her dad buys and sells lorries and, after raising Suzi and her older brother, her mum became his assistant. Suzi was the first in her family to go to university, while her 24 cousins (“Christmas is mad”) all do what she terms “proper jobs” – working in pubs, waitressing, scaffolding.

She used to bunk off school. “I wasn’t clever and didn’t have friends. I had a chip on my shoulder because I was gay and I was keeping this big secret, so I was just a ball of anger, and I think my teachers just gave up on me. I went to a school where a teacher might not even turn up. So I thought, if I wasn’t worth teaching, it wasn’t worth having ambition. Ambition wasn’t instilled in us at school – it was my mum and dad who encouraged me.”

Joining a youth drama group helped persuade Suzi to become a comedic actress – Victoria Wood, French and Saunders and Catherine Tate are her heroes. She later attended drama school in London and it was there she first did stand-up – “I felt really comfortable on stage as me, not in character” – and decided this was where her career lay.

And her fanbase? “Broad, I think: people who’ve seen me in clubs or supporting other comics, gay men and women, and quite a few teenage gays who come with their parents. I’m a safe bet for families – I can be a bit cheeky on stage but not coarse. My general rule is I have to be able to say it in front of my mum and dad.

Keeping It Classy had a sellout run at the Edinburgh Fringe last August, and Suzi has updated sections of it – including Brexit, which can divide the room, but which she tackles nonetheless. “I’m still angry about it, but lots of my family voted for it and I understand why,” she says. “But you have to find ways of making even such a divisive subject funny – and I don’t want my act to be a TED talk.

“I mean, I want people to think, but I want them to laugh more. Actually, I just like buggering about on stage.”

Suzi Ruffell performs Keeping It Classy at the Wardrobe Theatre on Tuesday, March 27. For more info, visit thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/suzi-ruffell-keeping-classy

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