There are lots of actors, and you need a way to stand out. Writing comedy sketches was a way of doing that.

Comedy is helping a lot at the moment. It also seems to be getting under Trump's skin and revealing a lot about the kind of thin-skinned fool that he is.

I was the kid who liked making other people laugh, so maybe the comedy came before the acting.

You feel you can pretend to be young until you're 50, but after that, what happens and how do you approach it?

I think that there's an idea in 2016 that if a woman doesn't have it all then she's lacking in some way, and I think that 'having it all' is the kid, the relationship and the career, and that seems horribly skewed. I get genuinely excited when I meet women - or men - who don't want to have children. It's refreshing and unusual and means they're not swayed by what society has told them, they're just listening to their own basic instincts. I love meeting people who are fulfilled by other things. I think, 'lucky old you' when I meet someone single.

I think that's important to women in comedy, that we get a lot of the good lines and you're not just the girlfriend or the sister.

I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I've done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It's not deliberate: it's what makes me laugh, and there's a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.