I am not keen on the idea of an oversharer. I don't like that as a problem. I have more of a problem with an undershare. If I'm talking to somebody and I ask them how their love life is and they say "fine," that's a problem for me. I want to know things about people, I feel like we're all here on this planet, and intimacy is important.

I'm not interested in being gratuitously relatable and broadening out what I do in order to reach more people. When I'm going into specific details of the trauma, I think it's the details that connect with people. I'm accidentally relatable - I didn't mean to be, and I didn't think I would be. It feels like what I'm saying on stage is quite shameful and possibly perverted; so for other people to be laughing and go, "Oh, yes, we understand that. We are like that too," is very lovely.

I realize that in everything I was saying, that underneath my words was essentially, "why can't we be less judgemental and more like me." Which is judgemental and arrogant, to try and change somebody else's perspective just so that the world can seem better for you. It's important that we have these contrasts in life - nothing was ever created by being the same.

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.

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.

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.

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.