Mawaan Rizwan has a degree in funny. Though he rose to fame as a precocious teenage YouTuber, he is a formally qualified comedian, having trained in clowning at the prestigious Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris. As he tells it, it was an experience more akin to boot camp than running away to join the circus.

“It’s absolutely traumatic,” he recollects. “There’s a guy called Philippe Gaulier in the suburbs of Paris and you go there and you live basically as a clown with 30 other students in the class, and you have to make each other laugh and do these impossible tasks. But it’s done in a really traumatising way. And he just knocked you down – it’s a bit like the film Whiplash. But with red noses.

“He beats you down so much and he lets you know that no one cares and you’re not important and you’re not clever – and stop trying to be clever and actually maybe just rely on authenticity and your inherent sense of joy that you actually come back to quite a simple way of making comedy.”

An “inherent sense of joy” is easy to see in Rizwan’s most recent opus, Juice, a sitcom which he created and in which he stars as Jamma, a young Pakistani-British man navigating love, family and work stresses with a mixture of childlike exuberance and obsessive neuroses, while his internal fantasy world repeatedly intrudes into his reality.

You can see all that training pay off as he hurls himself into his work with abandon, throwing gags at the story like Jackson Pollock spattering paint onto canvas. Juice is picked out in vivid colour and movement, with the surrealistic blend of what’s actually going on around Jamma, and what’s going on within his mind, making for a fresh and bizarre aesthetic. With lots of dancing just for the hell of it.

Rizwan is a calm, thoughtful young artist, answering questions articulately and with careful consideration. Jamma is a wide-eyed human cartoon with a pudding-bowl haircut who finds the world of adulthood a baffling ordeal. How much of Jamma is Rizwan and vice versa?

“Well, Jamma is a massive attention seeker and is very insecure, so obviously it’s completely autobiographical,” he quips, before addressing the question more seriously. “I would say it’s a fictional piece. As a writer, you’re always drawing on feelings and emotions that I felt. But as a show, it departed quite early into fiction, and also the actors really helped with that when they came on board and made it their own. That really helped me to detach because it is really difficult writing about yourself and your life. And I didn’t really want to sign up to that. It’s much easier to write in metaphors and parallels.”

The actors Rizwan is talking about include Russell Tovey (Being Human, American Horror Story) as Jamma’s boyfriend Guy, a therapist who tolerates Jamma’s insecurity and flights of fancy with slightly weary good humour; but also Rizwan’s own family members: his brother Nabhaan and mother Shahnaz star as, perhaps unsurprisingly, Jamma’s brother and mother. Working with family can be fraught but Rizwan is used to it: a move born from necessity that has turned out brilliantly.