Do you enjoy it when people tell you how wonderful you are? Or are you getting kind of sick of it now?
No, I like it, very much even! But it's just not quite as exciting as it used to be. Like if I was doing a gig and I got one e-mail one day after a show, from someone saying how much they thought the show was amazing; that was incredible. And now, I don't have time to read them. Which is humbling, and flattering and all that, but I do really like people liking me and my work. Something that happens with access to the internet is, of course, you get a false impression of what your audience is? Because the young kids write to me, whereas the old people don't. So I'm like, 'oh yeah the young kids like me', but it seems lots of people like my work, but the young kids are the ones that write to me, and so.. Probably only about one in ten, one in twenty of those complimentary emails really resonate, because they're mostly like "Omgz ur so awsum! I luv u! U rite funi songz an hav cool hair! Omgz!", and that's it. But every now and again I get one, like today, I got one from an 18 year old and it was like this big paragraph and it sort of explained why he thought I was great, and yeah. And! I tell you what... I fucking hate getting criticism! Like all people.. So, even though you can get a million good comments, if someone sends me a thing saying you know, "Bashing religion isn't funny", or something, "You've got a foul mouth", or whatever, no actually - that doesn't worry me, because I don't give a fuck those sort of people think - But if someone says something, or if I get a bad review or something, it outweighs a million good comments because that's human nature isn't it. You're skinny, you're skinny, you're skinny, you're skinny, you're skinny, you're fat! I'm fat?!
Oh god!
You're not fat.
What makes an interview good for you?
Um, I guess the most important thing is that the person has an interest in your work. Like, I get lots of interviews from people who have been told by their newspaper to interview me, or my publicist has gone to the... I don't know, the Norwich Times or something..
Oh gosh! I'm from Norwich!
Really?! There you go! I'm psychic, well.. If I believed in them I would be one. Um, I um.. yeah, and they go, "So, what is it you do? Describe your work", and you just go..
Ugh, do your research.
Yeah! It's just like, ok I don't mind that you don't know who I am, there's lots of people, I'm still very much small, but I'm not so unknown that I feel the need to explain myself all the time. You write my name into google and there's an hour of reading for you! You don't have to do an hour.. do twenty minutes! Do fucking ten, don't just ask me to explain myself.
You don't even have to do any reading! You can just watch one of the videos on YouTube and at least get the gist of what you do.
Yeah! That's right. It's, they're just so lazy.. But you know, just as long as someone's asking questions from a point of knowledge, I don't care.
Regarding London and Hippos, can you clarify that the 'pissing in the hippos', is purely fictitious.
It is. Uh, um.. Well why would I confirm or deny that! Yes, my life is very conservative, which is something I take the piss out of in Rock and Roll Nerd, and all that sort of thing. I'm interested in the idea of not only sexual taboos, but all taboos. Which is what some things like, Some People Have It Worse Then Me is about. And it's very interesting, to me, that there's a huge amount of stuff that's unsaid, and I'm especially interested in the fact that, morally, society is extremely hypocritical in that they like censorship. They don't like foul language, they don't talk about sex, they're not allowing pubic hair on TV before eleven o'clock or whatever, and yet they're happy to put 'CSI' or 'Special Victims Unit', which is basically a whole show about rape, and we all watch that as a family because sexual violence is interesting or something. I mean, I don't mind SVU or whatever it's called, but it's bullshit that rape's okay, and sex is not. And I also believe, all men especially, and probably all women - I don't know, I'm not one - are sexually perverted well beyond what anyone discusses. Which shouldn't matter, we don't need to discuss it all the time, but it's a nice place to go with comedy, because, sitting in the back of everyone’s brain, you just look at how many people watch porn on the internet, that just shows that people aren't into love making, they're into fucking- I shouldn't be talking about this with two young ladies, but you know, they're into all their crazy shit. And I don't think we need to all sit around talking about it, but as a comedian, my job is to.. scrape the barrel!
Ali: All the things people think about but no one's game to say.
Mmm. Which, is fine you know, but uh.. every now and then, you think, well if you can't go to a comedy show and watch a comedian explore that; then where can you? And that's my job maybe? And to say that stuff like; we all spend our lives going "oh, I'm miserable", and "oh, I don't like my life", and then there's all this shit going on with starving people in the world and all these terrible things. It's obvious! We all know that happiness is relative and that we're the luckiest people in the world, but fucking, sometimes it needs to be said and maybe that's my job too? Not that I think I'm going to change the world or anything..