I find it incredibly boring when people are mean about some individuals, especially if the individual has no power. I can understand how someone deems it necessary if somebody is in power to tear them down - I think that's really crucial. I make a lot of mean jokes about myself; as a theme, suffering seems to me a very interesting thing for comedy, but not the suffering of a particular individual.

I have tried... believe me, I have tried to like rap music. It makes me feel so very, very old. I have tried to get home with the downies.

I used to live with two other guys. We used to cook two things. The first one was called 'cheese... thing' and that was where you get something and you melt cheese over it and the first one to guess what it is doesn't have to wash up. That's obviously quite Mediterranean; the other one was less complex. It was just called 'cheese fantasy.' That's where you come in, very drunk, at about five in the morning and find an apple and just pretend there's some cheese on it.

When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first went to a comedy club - I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office.

Men don't know anything! Men don't know when their lives became so entirely awful, when everyone else turned into such a tosser! A man does not know how he came by the half a pie he is holding in his hand. And scientists - those frauds - seize on this, and try to use it as proof of the mysteries of human consciousness and the unknowable nature of the brain, which is rubbish!

America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.

When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.