Because I don't do stand-up, radio has always been my equivalent, a place to stay in connection with the public and force myself to write every week and come up with new characters. Plus it's a medium that – having grown up with it and putting myself to sleep with a radio under my pillow [as a kid] – I love. No matter what picture you want to create in the listener's mind, a few minutes of work gets it done.

Music can happen with equal ease as a solo or collaborative venture, it seems to me.

Here's a guy [Richard Nixon] who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk.

[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

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 would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially.

I didn't have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.