Zitat des Tages von Dylan Moran:
People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'
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.
What is universal can be surprising. Over time you find the kind of stuff which has people thinking 'That is just something that occurred to me... there's something wrong with me', is in fact stuff that is universal.
I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.
The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.
I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.
I never thought I want to do anything, really, except not go to work properly and turn up at the same place every day and eat sandwiches in the same canteen, if I can possibly help it, as I don't think I'd be very good at it.
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 think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
I was very into New Order, Joy Division, all of that when I was younger. I had a lot of bootlegs that I saved up my pocket money to buy. I had all the obscure early EPs.
I've always been a big consumer of American journalism over the years and had an interest in the history of it and of the press in America; how it has changed.
I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.
The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.
I don't want to do the same thing over and over again.
America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.
I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it.
One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.
It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.
Do your own thing. Speak in your voice.
Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.
I don't go to different countries to criticise their political system and tell them what they should be doing - what do I know?
Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.
I'm delighted to make as many people feel ashamed as possible. There's probably a site like that for everybody. I've heard Newt Gingrich has his own as well.
I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.
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.
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.
The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.
You have to assume that you're talking to the most intelligent, tuned-in audience you could ever get. That's the way you're going to get the best out of people. Whether they know you or not shouldn't matter for comedy. They should get to know you pretty quickly. and they should be having a good time pretty quickly.
I'm actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.
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 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.
We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.
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.
As an Irish person, there's a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that's what we grow up with.
You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.