I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.

I don't want to do panel games or adverts. I really like challenges. I always get roles as an art teacher or a photographer. In the future I want to play something like a mugger/assassin/pastry chef.

I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.

When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

I'm really not big on nationalism, to be honest with you. I really don't think it gets people anywhere except near a pile of dead bodies. I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it.

The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.

You know, people sometimes say to me, 'Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write' but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you're always learning. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I'm actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them.

Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.

When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.

Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.

I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.

We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.

One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

I suppose the best comedy shows do have the rock n' roll feeling - if it's a great night, and the roof is raised... yeah, it's a similar feeling, sure.

What I prefer is an audience who listen. And are intelligent. Which I try and assume every audience is. And that if something goes wrong, it's generally my fault and not theirs.

Irish people give big hellos and very little goodbyes. Unless they're female, and then they spend five hours talking in the doorway to the person that's leaving their house.

I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years - 'I am buying these records, I am wearing this'. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.

You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.