The Republicans are calling the Democrats' plan to have a deadline for US troop withdrawal from Iraq an 'admission of failure', as opposed to the Republican plan which is 'failure without admission'.

If you want, you can try and get a broader perspective, or you can find people who are absolutely out of their minds, or find people that are doing incredibly complex and interesting and urgent journalism. And the same goes for our show. It's a prism into people's own ideologies, when they watch our program. This is just our take.

What I like to do is come in, write the entire program and treat my staff to hot stone massages.

If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-line, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans? Maybe he's not the problem.

Isn't it amazing what scientists can accomplish when no one makes them stop?

Our show is obviously at a disadvantage with any of the other news shows we're competing against. For one thing, we are fake. They are not. So in terms of credibility, we are ... well, oddly enough we're about even.

But the main thing I don't want to be is un-funny. That's really the mandate. Just whatever we're doing, make it as funny as we can possibly make it. And believe me, if the show starts going down, we'll introduce a baby. We'll do everything that they did on `Family Ties.' I'm not afraid of that.