If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.

You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.

I've got an odd, negative bond with C. Montgomery Burns. He reminds a lot of people of bosses they've worked for. He certainly reminds me of someone I'm working for.

I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

Music often happens even faster than comedy in terms of the creation.

I just think everyone knows you go on those [political satire] shows if you're a politician to, "humanize yourself" - to show, "Hey, I can take a joke." Well, why should satire be in the service of humanizing these people who are supposed to be the target of our venom and vitriol? I think that's unseemly.

I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.