Five years ago, Alan Davies revealed in his powerful and sometimes distressing memoir Just Ignore Him that he had been sexually abused by his father as a child.

White Male Stand-Up is about how the repercussions from that trauma echoed through his life as he made his way from a nascent comedy circuit to multimillionaire mainstream TV star.

‘If my last book was written on behalf of a damaged child, this one is a record of what happens when baked-in rage is unmanaged,’ Davies writes in his introduction.

‘I’ve created and performed  comedy for decades while repressing and suppressing so much. Becoming a comedian, or having any sort of public life, is often about building an edifice. This book is about taking one down, a story of working and living in the presence of a terrible secret and the possibility that everything could be lost in a moment.’

Like its predecessor, this is a far more self-analytical book than most celebrity autobiographies. His rise through the ranks of stand-up is interspersed with conversations with his therapist from the time, presumably paraphrased. These sit alongside an account of his diagnosis and treatment for bladder cancer last year, too.

Davies’s honesty means he doesn’t always come off looking good in his own stories, and there’s no doubt he has sometimes acted terribly over the years, exacerbated by cocaine and booze. The infamous 2007 incident when he bit a homeless man’s ear outside London’s members-only Groucho Club springs to mind. 

Although he downplays it here, that well-publicised moment fits into a pattern of behaviour he is disarmingly open about, ascribing it to the ‘angry boy’ inside him bubbling to the surface. The abuse, and unfairness that his mum died of  leukaemia when he was just six, is what fuels that fury.

That also means he can be a hard person to be in a relationship with – he goes into just enough detail to leave that impression – while his own mind has not always been a happy place to inhabit. Some elegiac and heartbreaking passages tell of him standing forlornly in the indoor swimming pool of the huge North London  house his Abbey National advert money bought him, alone and desperately sad. 

When a neighbourhood kid asks him for money, he seems to recognise a similarly damaged soul, and seeks to help, though the contacts between them are always strange.

White Male Stand-Up is more than misery memoir, however, and there are plenty of accounts of the good and goodish times, especially in a career  that starts with him taking a runners-up slot in the 1989 new act competition run by the Hackney Empire, rises through the mainstream success of Jonathan Creek, and ending up in QI.

There’s a certain nostalgia for the circuit’s early days, when comedians’ camaraderie was formed over drunken games of pool in the Comedy Cafe rather than monetised by appearing  on each others’ podcasts. 

Before stand-up became a business of building your brand, Davies describes legendary nights at the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, Malcolm Hardee’s Tunnel Palladium in Greenwich and jaunts to the Kilkenny Cat Laughs Festival where lifelong friendships were formed and banks of anecdotes built. Lee Evans talking cops out of giving him a ticket for running a red light post-gig, or the act called Sham The Uncoordinated Juggler setting fire to a Birmingham pub when a flaming club routine went awry is the sort of tale you can dine out on.

Despite doing well, Davies remains insecure. A telling account has him recalling an early TV gig which he remembers as an absolute disaster. But watching the footage back after writing those paragraphs, he finds it was all absolutely fine. And when he gets rusty from stand-up when his career takes off,  he has to be coaxed into returning to the stage at every turn.

The failure of beloved sitcom plans hits hard, and he’s still conflicted about taking the Abbey National money that bought him his gilded cage. It earned him the scorn of leftie mates on the comedy circuit, like Mark Steel, but did get him working with John Lloyd, who’d turned to making commercials after producing the likes of Blackadder, and who would later create QI. 

Every memoir has an angle, but White Male Stand-Up seems emotionally frank – and certainly doesn’t shy away from the vulnerabilities his genial panel-show persona hides – while squaring up to all aspects of his life with wit and good humour.

• White Male Stand-Up has been published by Monoray, priced £25. It is available from Amazon priced £16 in hardback or  £14.99 in Kindle, or  from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.