The idea of a life plan, "I'm here now, where do I need to go to..." There's always "And then what?" And eventually the end of that "and then what?" is death. I've just learned that I can't have such a narrow focus as I did as a child, because there is no end point, and eventually you feel empty if you're not also nourishing other things: joy, love, relationships.

I've stopped doing things that aren't clear comedy gigs - to do something that's not "comedy night," it's a difficult thing. People have to be given permission to laugh. You need to know it's comedy; otherwise you might just think I'm a man talking out loud.

If there's anything to be said in a broad way about different audiences it's that I live in a major city, and those themes of isolation, protectiveness, loneliness tend to resonate with other people in major cities. In a sleepier village, where people are married with their children, me standing up and saying, "This marriage idea is a funny old convention that we invented" - various things that are deconstructions of the norms of a culture - if people have already made decisions like that, they're more inclined to say "Please, stop talking about our marriages, 'cause we're here now."

I feel like we're all here on this planet, and intimacy is important. I can't bear small talk, it's awful. I want to get beyond that thing of discussing how the weather is a bit better today than it was yesterday, and how this is a nice restaurant. I want to get to what are the problems, what's really going on. Are you in love? Are you in a lot of pain? What's really going on in your life? I'm interested in that area, whether it's on stage or in real life.

Why be timid? Death is coming.

I'll just talk and talk for an hour, an hour and half, until funny things come out of my mouth - often things that I don't think will be funny, often things that I just thought were sentences, turn out to be funny, because they're the sentences of an idiot. There's level of self-awareness that develops, and I write down things that were funny, usually when I'm on stage, and that becomes the show.

I'm not playing a character. What I'm doing though is taking the worst, most shameful, peculiar, or troubling aspects of my personality. So there are elements of me that are not there. The happy version of me is not really in the show, because there's nothing funny about being happy. So it's more like I'm poaching on the funniest parts of me rather than actually creating some other character.