And like the old stereotype, I overcame my shyness by making my friends laugh.

Am I allowed to call myself working-class now? Because obviously I'm now very rich.

Well, sanity, I suppose, is getting people to see the world your way.

My favourite riposte to a heckle is to say, 'Excuse me, I'm trying to work here. How would you like it if I stood yelling down the alley while you're giving blow jobs to transsexuals?'

If you stay in a house and you go to the bathroom and there is no toilet paper, you can always slide down the banisters. Don't tell me you haven't done it.

It was a bizarre existence I led in my early twenties - that cliche of the comedian who goes out and entertains a roomful of people and then goes home to a lonely bedsit was unbelievably poignant for me because that was exactly what I was doing. I had periods of real loneliness.

I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all trailed off after the Sixties.