Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now - to quote myself at my most pretentious - is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.

I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them. And that's not funny.

Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs [in the song 'The Vatican Rag'], I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.

For there is surely nothing more beautiful in this world than the sight of a lone man facing single-handedly a half a ton of angry pot roast!

The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.

You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.

But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.