"You can over-cover it; if you really want to joke about Trump every time he says something crazy you will be joking about Trump 24/7," he says. "In that sense, we find ourselves looking at it and saying we have to take a break from it. Over-covering the insanity is one of the pitfalls."

There are, however, still rich pickings for those who make a career of satirising establishment institutions. "In terms of source material this is a golden age, it's an election year, there is no incumbent and the personalities involved are very big personalities," he says.

There are also many more channels and platforms digesting the same material from the 24/7 media news cycle. "Colbert taking over from Letterman has a real political bent so he's touching on stuff that Letterman would only have glanced on," he says. "There's more people to feed."

Chieng, from a Malaysian-born Chinese background, grew up in Singapore and studied at the University of Melbourne. Like many comedians he exchanged a career in law for a less certain fate on stage at the mercy of an often unforgiving audience.

Described by one critic as "an angry little Incredible Hulk with a microphone", Chieng has landed on his feet. His gig as a reporter on The Daily Show is a genuine coup. He has filmed a TV pilot for the ABC. And he is returning to Melbourne for the upcoming comedy festival.

The post-internet world, he agrees, has given emerging comedians a more prominent platform to push out content and get noticed. "The gatekeepers are different now," he says. "But old media still has a lot to give, they have production values, they have experience, they have credibility."

Chieng returned to Melbourne late last year to film his ABC pilot, Ronny Chieng: International Student, which documents his struggle to fit in at university and fulfil his family's wishes and become a lawyer. Like Chieng's on stage repertoire, it touches on his ethnicity and his family life.

It's an unexpectedly risky space, given there are varying levels of comfort in the audience with what is perceived as race-themed humour, and can provoke questions about whether an audience has permission to laugh.

"In Asia, people joke about race all the time and they don't see anything wrong with it, because comedy is still starting out there, and that's the most relatable topic," Chieng says. "In the UK they have had comedy for so long the comedy sensibility is sophisticated, so they would be like, what are you doing?"

On the question of offence, Chieng says it's not a do or die proposition. "There is a way to talk about race without being offensive, there is a level where you can talk about race and no reasonable person would get offended. [But] this is an art form, there are degrees, and where you draw that line is hard to say."

Chieng returns to Melbourne next month to perform his show You Don't Know What You're Talking About at the 30th annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival. .

Australia's culture of comedy festivals, like the UK, lends itself naturally to "themed" shows, though Chieng says he just focuses on telling good jokes, rather than a linked narrative. "You go on a journey, you laugh, you learn something, you empathise with the person telling it."

His secret, he adds, is that he refines new material privately, in front of small test audiences bribed with the promise of free pizza. "One hour, all new material and I bomb," he says. "I eat shit for 10 shows and by the 10th show I have something that is okay. You have to bomb and try stuff to see what sticks."

Ronny Chieng: You Don't Know What You're Talking About, Melbourne Town Hall, March 31 and April 1, tickets at comedyfestival.com.au. The Melbourne International Comedy Festival runs March 23 to April 17.