He’s the wild frat boy turned middle-aged dad who loves guns, is friends with Joe Rogan and once helped rob a Russian train. Is Britain ready for the man who was America’s official No 1 hellraiser?
We are half an hour into the interview when the US comic Bert Kreischer starts telling me about his recent panic attacks, the worst he’s ever had. The type where he is locked in the bathroom all night, doing breathing exercises on the toilet, trying in vain to calm himself down. He’s been riddled with them, he says, and he’s pretty sure it’s down to travelling so much, spending most of the past year away from his family and drinking more than he should.
“Then I go on stage and it disappears so I’m like: ‘Why is this the one place where I’m comfortable?’ I didn’t want to get off stage last night because I knew, the second I got off, I was going to go back to feeling shit,” he says.
