He has reason to be smug. No pun intended, but Burns is red hot right now. He has played Off-Broadway, in Australia and he has had millions of views on TikTok. He’s a comedian with a popular, relatable streak following in the footsteps of Billy Connolly and Kevin Bridges. Daniel Sloss has called him “the future of Scottish stand-up,” and Sloss knows all about Scottish stand-up. From the moment Burns walks onstage the audience knows they are in for a great night.

The surprise is that it took so long for him to break through. He is soft-spoken offstage but witty and thoughtful as he recalls being the classic funny child. He was the youngest of four and suggests that might be the root of his humour: “I realised really early that I wasn’t gonna get out of stuff with any kind of physical prowess so I think I got good at being funny. If I annoyed one of my siblings I’d make them laugh as well and get away with it.”

It was the same at school. “I figured if I could make all the social groups laugh I’d get a bit of a pass.” He was initially interested in a music career and started studying electronic engineering at Edinburgh Napier University but dropped out in the third year, taking a job as a domestic appliance engineer – that’s washing machine repair man to you. “I was the youngest there by 25 years. The other guys were so miserable. They’d say they took this job as a stopgap 18 years ago and were stuck still doing it. It scared the shit out of me and gave me a massive kick up the arse.”

Burns decided that he had to quit or he’d end up regretting it. He did his first gig in 2017 in Glasgow at the Yes Bar but kept it a secret. He didn’t even tell his girlfriend at the time. “I would have rather have been caught coming out of a brothel. I think that would have been easier for me to explain.”

Those early gigs were by far the toughest. “Starting out is so hard that if your heart is not in it you won’t make it through the first year. When you have a bad gig you’re so demoralised. I think you’ve just got to have some kind of sickness that makes you want to see it through.” The open mic circuit for newcomers is like boot camp for comedy. “It’s funny because you begin with some of the hardest gigs you’ll ever play and as you get more successful and start playing theatres it gets easier.”

Burns was determined to succeed and he was starting to making a living out of comedy when Covid struck. It actually turned out to be just what his career needed. It meant rethinking his approach to comedy. “Covid was a real marker for me. I started posting stuff online and had a kind of hard reset.”

When the comedy circuit re-opened he had a new attitude: “I thought if this ever goes back to normal I’m just gonna do it the way I want to do it because then at least I’ll be having a good time.” His fearless outlook worked and he truly found his voice. “I wanted my stand-up to be a bit more honest and a bit more raw. I felt like I was too scared to do any of that before. There’s nothing like a mass near-death experience to be able to think I can talk about whatever I want. I didn’t feel I needed to soften my jagged edges.”

Since then his shows have got stronger and funnier and his popularity has rocketed. There have been millions of views of him in action onstage across Instagram and TikTok. Burns is living, laughing proof that you can now make it big without old fashioned TV exposure.

It helps that he has such an impressive, intelligent everyman voice – his dad used to work on oil rigs, his mum worked in a bingo hall – that finds the comic angles in any topic. In his 2023 debut comedy special Vertigo he reflected on everything from submarines and ageing knees to accents you wouldn’t want to hear in the bedroom. In his 2024 follow-up hour 1994 he wondered whether the year of his birth was a better year than current times. With his razor-sharp wit he finds laughs wherever he goes.

“If you say something that’s just a wee bit tucked away in that part of your brain there’s a sigh of relief in the audience where everyone goes ‘Oh my god I thought I was the only person who thought that and I thought I was a terrible person.’ When you go out on a limb and the audience goes with you there’s no better feeling. It’s like finding a new little scab to pick.”

And now there is his latest show, the must-see GALLUS, which mixes smart social observations and a vivid account of a road trip across America with his fiancee, who is the daughter of a comedian and was born in Scotland but grew up in the USA before returning to study law. Everyone in Scotland knows what ‘gallus’ means but as this tour goes all over the UK maybe he needs to explain it: “It means cheeky or bold.”

Burns was inspired to use the word as a title after noticing a contrast between American and Scottish attitudes. “In Scotland we expect the worst and anything else is a bonus. I wanted to find a Scottish word that reflected the positivity I saw in America. I know people think America has soured but when you actually meet the people it’s not like that. Gallus is maybe a Scottish person with American positivity!”

While others base their opinion of America on what they see on social media Burns found that visiting places such as New Orleans eye-opening and the people he met were refreshingly hospitable. “We think there are all these bad things going on, but 90% of it is not true. We just think it is because of this”. He points to his iPhone – social media has been good for his career but he thinks there is a big downside too.

Perhaps he is ever so slightly biased about America. Not just his family connection via his-soon-to-be-in-laws, but New York appears to have already embraced him. He has recently returned from the city where he was asked to be part of the New York Comedy Festival and the prestigious Fringe Encore series. He did so well last year they invited him back. Clearly the New Yorkers have warmed to this electronics engineering drop out-turned-master craftsman stand-up.

Burns loves performing and makes holding an audience in the palm of his hand seem effortless. Yet offstage he is a very different person. “A lot of it doesn’t really make any sense to me. People think that you must be attention-seeking. You’ve got a crowd of people facing you. You are the only one in the room allowed to talk. People think I love being the centre of attention. But offstage there’s nothing worse. I love just being able to blend in with a group.”