Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'll never have a house party again. You stand around for ages worried that nobody's coming and the next minute you're queuing for your own toilet while someone you've never met is asking you if you know whose party this is.
I'd had a variety of jobs - shop assistant, writer of children's magazines - but had found myself, funnily enough, as quite an uninformed sports journalist so I might have stuck with that, but I would never have been very good at it.
Even in something surreal like 'Father Ted,' everything has to logically follow, everything has to lead one to another. The moment the logic of a situation doesn't work then you might as well not bother because people have signed out.
I think when you start comedy there are some real advantages to being single and in a low-paid job. You have nothing to lose. It's not like I was a well-paid lawyer when I began. I was earning so little I was able to sell myself to it.
I wasn't into making classmates laugh - or any of the comedy cliches. I wanted to disappear. I was a nonentity. I wasn't too clever but I wasn't in the bottom group. I wasn't loud but I wasn't quiet. I wasn't a bully and I wasn't bullied.
I never finished looking at Twitter happier than when I've started looking at Twitter. And it's not because of abuse or anything. Even just refreshing what people are saying about you, I don't think is a healthy way to kind of perceive yourself.
The weird thing is I have now met quite a lot of people who are really famous but they are always disappointingly normal and nice. Alan Carr is very nice indeed. Exactly how you would expect him to be, and not that different from how he is on stage.
No, I never really set out to be a stand up. I wanted to be a writer of some sort. I thought I'd do a bit of stand up and hopefully that will lead to stuff and little did I know it kind of snowballed. Before I knew it I was doing stand up 300 nights a year.
The great thing about stand up is you get to do other things. You get to do your stand up tours but you also get to do 'Have I Got News For You.' You get to do a sitcom, but you also get to do the 'Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice.' I'm easily bored, so I like the variety.
I was once doing a gig with Tim Vine; he was backstage, and there was one of those long strings of polystyrene coffee cups. He picked up the whole stack of about 20, walked on stage and then said: 'Bloody hell this coffee's hot!' which I think is the funniest thing anyone has ever said.
When I first went to university, I did a big shop with my dad. We bought loads of stuff but it didn't occur to me that I needed to refrigerate it, so I just put it in my room. I remember thinking, 'What's that smell coming from under the bed?' It was a bag of potatoes. How long does it take for a potato to rot? Months!
I really struggled with doing nine-to-five and just wanted to do something where it felt like I was in charge and I was doing something creative. I imagine if the first gig had gone badly I'd never have done it again. I imagine there's hundreds of people who could have been really great comedians and just had a bad first gig.
I moved to London when I was 21 and I needed a job. I'd just done a year working in Waterstones in Manchester and I was looking for any old job. This advertisement came up for an editorial assistant on Dora the Explorer Magazine. Because I'd been working in the Children's Department in a bookshop for a year I just nailed the interview.