I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.

I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.

I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I'm down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.

The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.

There's a part of me that still hates everything, and my natural view default setting is still very cynical and dark