Rodney Marks, the 425th person I’ve met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, is a comedian who specialises in “hoaxes and jokeses”.

Rodney does a mix of stand-up comedy gigs, humorous keynote speeches and comic hoaxes. His hoaxes range from the simple – delivering a speech as one of his 350-plus characters – to the sublime – spending days embedded in companies as a fake employee.

While Rodney has a fabulous sense of humour, he is far from flamboyant. When he was at school, he was known as the quiet kid, and former classmates are still surprised at how his life unfolded.

After leaving school, Rodney studied drama, with plans to become an actor. He ended up doing his fair share of theatre and TV gigs, but didn’t enjoy working with other actors. So, at age 34, he became a comedian.

These days, the only person Rodney has to work with is his co-writer (and son) Benjamin. Besides writing jokes and scripts, the two of them have created a series of satirical business books (with titles like ‘Ethics’ and ‘Leadership’) whose pages are entirely blank. Humour and conciseness are qualities I cherish, so I would happily give these books a five-star review.

Rodney is a devoted father and grandfather – he proudly told me about his children and spent most of our lunch babysitting two of his grandkids. Or at least I think they were his.