The thing that nobody really said about Rebecca Adlington is that she looks pretty weird. She looks like someone who's looking at themselves in the back of a spoon.

I think the most important things my book does is to give readers the address of George Monbiot's website and how to get hold of comic books by Grant Morrison.

That's what I do in my stand-up. I work hard and hone the material and after a while audiences expect what I do to be good.

I'm not cynical at all.

I love the BBC and I think it's a really important thing.

I have some friends who are comedians but not many.

I've never felt any sense of kinship with other comedians; they've always seemed too needy.

Comedy is a terrible way to meet women. It's certainly a way to start talking to them, but they always have preconceptions about you.

I absolutely loathe adverts. I won't go into the cinema until 20 minutes after the film is due to start because there are so many.

I read tons of comic books. My favourite is Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic writer.

I've said jokes where I thought people might get up and hit me for this. A couple of people have thought about it. But they didn't. It gives you a lot of power, because if you're on shows where people are worried about getting sacked and you're not, then you're transcendent because you say what other people would like to say.

Comedians shame people.

I loved the idea of Bowie as an artist, with his Burroughsian cut-up technique, creating these undecipherable, abstract songs, where we all projected our own meanings onto his jarring word choices and unexpected chord changes.

Doug Stanhope is great - I saw his 'Burning the Bridge to Nowhere' show and it was inspiring. He's like an anti-shaman, taking the sting out of a bunch of things we've chosen to give a symbolic power to. I've made it sound noble and worthy there, it's not, it's really funny.

I have no real enemies in comedy, but there are a couple of people who I'd laugh about if I heard that their legs had fallen off.

Remember, taboos are just a map of what a society feels it's acceptable to be neurotic about. Taboos aren't rational.

I worry about everything in this country in particular.

America has gone from the Obama Years to the Trump Years, like going from the 'West Wing' to a sitcom where the incidental music involves a tuba.

British people have a really sophisticated sense of humour, because we're exposed to much more than Europeans and Americans, not least in our literary heritage.

Only the British could experience great pain at the thought of a traffic jam - a place where you can sit alone with your radio on without being expected to do any work. Aren't traffic jams unbearable? By the time you get home, you need to sit alone in a comfy chair with your favourite music on just to calm down.

The average British person would hear me doing my joke about Rebecca Adlington and realise there's no malice in it. It was an off-the-cuff ad lib.

I doubt anyone has ever accused comedians of solidarity before. It's hard to think of a less collegiate world than that of unabashed professional narcissists competing for attention; even when we reluctantly band together on panel shows, we're only trying to sell solo tours.

Having our privacy exposed is particularly crushing for the British - a nation for whom the phrase: 'How are you?' really means: 'Please say one word, then leave me alone.'

If you feel more emotion looking at a picture of queuing lorries than a picture of desperate humans living in a lay-by, you need to check your bedtime routine for someone beating you round the head with a meat tenderiser.