Am I allowed to call myself working-class now? Because obviously I'm now very rich.
I looked at longevity in show business when I was about 13, and the people who seemed to have longevity were the ones who'd spent quite a bit of time learning about what they were doing before they made it.
I've never been disappointed by politicians. I've never invested that much in them in the first place.
I don't always vote in general elections, but I think I've always voted Labour.
Well, sanity, I suppose, is getting people to see the world your way.
I think having an outsider's viewpoint is interesting and good, especially for a comedian.
When I was nine I spent a lot of my time reading books about the history of comedy, or listening to the Goons or Hancock, humour from previous generations.
In fact, I don't watch a lot of contemporary comedy for fear of being influenced by it.
I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all trailed off after the Sixties.
When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn't about remembering jokes. It was about creating them.
In 1986, I was attacked in the street as I helped Neil Mullarkey from the Comedy Store Players to put up posters. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time - midnight - and we were English. I got kicked in the head.
Generally speaking, politicians are an odd bunch. They seem to have very thick skins and genuinely don't care what people think. And charm is a very important part of the politician's armoury. I try to resist that kind of charm.
At one point in the mid-Eighties I shared a promoter with the Smiths. One night, we were sitting backstage when Morrissey burst in, utterly distraught, sobbing his heart out. Turns out someone had thrown a sausage at him on stage during 'Meat Is Murder.'
If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.
I read every book about Buster Keaton and Chaplin to see how they worked - it's all about dedication, tunnel vision, pursuit of perfection, getting the gag right.
It was a bizarre existence I led in my early twenties - that cliche of the comedian who goes out and entertains a roomful of people and then goes home to a lonely bedsit was unbelievably poignant for me because that was exactly what I was doing. I had periods of real loneliness.
It seems like a contradiction, but the shy person who is a performer actually does make sense, because in a way, when you're young and shy, making people laugh is a good way to make friends. It's an instant connection.
When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of humour. I don't mean - well, maybe I do - laugh at the hangman as he puts the noose around your neck. But an eye, an ear, for the ridiculous, the absurd in life, can get you through a lot.
I never give anyone advice: it can backfire horribly. In the 1950s, Eric Morecambe told Ken Dodd to get his teeth fixed. But those teeth turned out to be one of Dodd's big selling points.
