Before Shazia Mirza appeared at The World Performing Arts Festival in Lahore, Pakistan, she was given some words of advice – don’t talk about sex. “They told me: ‘Talk about anything you like – music, marriage, relationships, drugs, alcohol – just don’t mention sex’,” she says. “I’ve got a couple of anal sex jokes but I didn’t use them the first night.” No, Mirza saved those for the second night.

“I realised the audience was just a normal audience, so after a couple of nights I started using them. I brought the house down.” Sadly, the house was literally brought down a few days later when three bombs went off at the Qaddafi Stadium Cultural Complex where the festival was being held. “Lahore is very modern. It’s like being in England. But it’s sensitive at the moment in other areas of Pakistan.

The Taliban are coming in and they don’t like comedy, or entertainment... or reading books.”

While she was there Mirza appeared on Pakistan’s answer to Newsnight. When the presenter, apparently a “pin-up” with “a dyed golden-brown bouffant, perfectly groomed fingernails and a dazzling set of veneered teeth”, asked her where she was staying, the comic deadpanned – “Well, I’m not staying at The Marriott”, referring to the Islamabad hotel targeted by terrorists in 2008.

But it is all pretty tame comic material for Mirza – a woman who (dressed in a hijab) made her name in 2001 with the unforgettable post 9/11 introduction – “My name’s Shazia Mirza – at least, that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence”.

Being a Muslim woman who occasionally treads the very thin line between bad taste and comedy has proved a divisive shtick, especially in the Muslim community. Over the years there have been death threats, vicious emails and even the odd on-stage attack – all of which Mirza struggles to understand – “I’m only trying to make people laugh”.

It’s what the comic will be trying to do when she performs in Brighton on April 15, where she says audiences can expect a tweaked version of her Edinburgh show, A Portrait Of Shazia Mirza.

“There’ll be some Obama stuff”, says Mirza, who was in the US for the presidential election build-up. “It was Obama mania. They were even selling condoms with his head on in Times Square!”

Mirza wrote in her New Statesman column that she had bought the commemorative contraceptives in bulk but, being a devout Muslim, she was, of course, only joking.

While the US president inspired some of the show’s content, the title came by way of a surreal visit to the National Portrait Gallery in London.

“My portrait was in there next to Nelson Mandela in the People Of Today exhibition. How ridiculous is that? I don’t know how I got there.” Was she flattered? “No, more bemused.

I went into the gallery and there was a woman standing by a portrait of David Beckham, who was next to Nelson Mandela and then me. The woman looked at my picture and said, ‘Oh, I think that’s Winnie Mandela when she was young’. Obviously. Why would I be there?” Was she tempted to put the woman straight? “God no, I was so embarrassed.”

Talking of embarrassed, it is fair to say Mirza’s parents have been struggling with her choice of career since the day she told them she was ditching her job as a science teacher. “I think it’s a bit like being gay,” she says of the situation. “We get to the dinner table and don’t really talk about it. We just use euphemisms. My dad will say, ‘How are things in the office?’”

How do they feel about being used as material for her show? “They know I use them but we don’t really talk about it”. It’s probably just as well considering some of Mirza’s jokes – “My dad has sex with prostitutes. It’s OK – my mum pays. She hates sex”. Then there is the tamer but funnier twist on some advice her mother gave her as a child growing up in Birmingham – “(She) would constantly say, ‘Don’t go out after 4pm – you will be raped’. Do all rapists come out at 4.01pm?

Do they say, ‘Oy, Ahmed, let’s get her before Countdown?’”

Her mum is, unsurprisingly, never in the audience, but Mirza says an increasing number of Muslim women are. “My show in Birmingham was sold out and there were lots of Asian women, which I would never have expected to see before.”

While she undoubtedly has her fans, there are those who argue she is famous because of her unique niche in the comedy market – being a Muslim woman – not because she is funny.

“I think it’s racist,” she says. “I have done five Edinburgh shows. I tour all over the world and gig every night of the week. It’s a bit naïve to think I’d still be here after eight years. “No one would say Jimmy Carr is where he is just because he’s white and posh. I think it’s ridiculous.”

She says she gets a lot of feedback from her shows and in this country it usually arrives in the form of a well-meaning letter.

“People never tell you at the gig. I don’t know why, but they’d rather tell you after. I think it might be a British thing. In other countries they’ll come and tell you after the show – ‘I liked that or I didn’t like that’. In Britain they’ll write you a letter saying, ‘I didn’t like this’ and then give you advice on how to improve.

You reply to ask what they do for a living and they say, ‘I’m a chartered accountant’.”

But Mirza doesn’t just do comedy. She recently ventured to Hove for her BBC Three documentary F*** Off, I’m A Hairy Woman.

“Somehow it was decided women in Brighton are the hairiest in Britain.” In a quest to love her body hair, Mirza, who claims she ended up looking like a King Kong tribute act, went au natural for seven months – not an easy task for a hirsute woman.

“I have been a serial hair remover – waxing, shaving and plucking – since I was 14, when I should have been learning about the speed of molecular activity in an equilibrium reaction. Instead, I was bleaching my moustache.”

Mirza, who admits she “got rid of it all” as soon as the documentary was completed, is also about to appear in another TV show – Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker’s, Newswipe, which Mirza describes as a British version of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in the US.

“I’m the roving reporter who takes a satirical look at the news.” Her first report is on the contentious Google Street View. “I’ll be looking at how, on one hand, everyone wants privacy but, on the other, they also want to be famous.”

Mirza herself has always wanted to be famous. She can remember sitting with her family at Eid and her aunties and uncles asking the children what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Her cousins dutifully replied they wanted to be doctors but not Mirza.

“I said I wanted to be an actress. Afterwards my mother told me I was on no account to show them up again.”

Luckily for Mirza, things seem to have gone her way.

  • Shazia Mirza will be at Komedia in Brighton, on Wednesday, 8pm, £10/£8, call 0845 2938480.