When I was a student I was very, very ambitious, completely immersed in my comedy career. I never had that period of reckless hedonism that you should get out of your system in your youth.

If you got the balls to follow something through, you can end up being the coolest, smartest guy in the room, because you've literally put your ass on the line.

I'm not elitist. I like to do crowd-pleasing stuff which is a bit smart, but is just about belly laughs.

I do like to make people cringe. That discomfort, tension, embarrassment, pain - all of those things interest me, and not through some sort of masochistic or sadistic impulse. It illuminates what being a human being is. It taps into what it is to be human more incisively than stuff that's just very pedestrian.

I find impressionists slightly annoying, really.

The tabloids operate in an amoral parallel universe where the bottom line is selling newspapers.

I don't like new bands. I don't want to be one of those pathetic old men in their forties who knows exactly what 18-year-olds are into.