“Within a few years these "jokes" as we comedians call them, will have been entirely purged from my work in favour, exclusively, of grinding repetition, embarrassing silence and passive-aggressive monotony.”

“I am sick of reading on Daily Mail message boards that I am 'one of these foul-mouthed modern comedians' when I am absolutely not. Honestly, who are these cunts?”

“All the proper bands from then, when we were kids, yeah? The Rubettes and Mud and Chicory Tip. Yeah. Not like the bands they have now, stupid, modern bands all made out of wire and electricity.The proper old bands. You'd buy the singles, wouldn't you? The old singles they used to have in the old days. The proper ones. Very nostalgic feelings towards Woolworths. The pick 'n' mix. Remember the pick 'n' mix in Woolworths? All the sweets individually wrapped. Proper, old-fashioned sweets, yeah? Not like the sweets they have now, all with knives in them and AIDS.”

“Most Americans do not own passports. They’re not a naturally curious people. If you were to lock an American for sixty years in an empty underground bunker which contained nothing but a woolly tea cosy, the American would not even be curious enough to be tempted to see if the tea cosy would make a serviceable hat. They’re far more likely to arrest the tea cosy, intern it illegally in Guantanamo Bay, and then repeatedly anally rape it until such time that it admits that it was actually a member of an al-Qaeda training cell. Even though at the time of the alleged offence the tea cosy was actually working as a shop assistant in a branch of Currys in Wolverhampton.”

“In the Vatican square, they were selling lollipops. You could buy lollipops about that big with the face of Pope John Paul II on them. You could buy a Pope John Paul II's face lollipop. I bought about ten. And I just thought... In the light of his death a few months later, I wondered whether sales of those lollipops went up or whether they went down. Did good Catholics think, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. It would now seem inappropriate... to lick a sugar effigy of his face.'Or did they go, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. But what better way... ...to commemorate his life than by licking a sugar effigy of his face?”

“When I was fourteen, I had a massive poster on my wall of a giant pop-art mouth advertising a Swiss exhibition of abstract art. My friends and family mocked my pretention, but I loved that poster and the hope it offered of an exciting world of thought beyond the boundaries of stifling Solihull. But one day the poster fell off the wall and the dog pissed all over it, ruining it for ever, while my mother laughed. That poster is what the Alternative Comedy dream meant to me - the possibility of a better world. And now it is covered in dog's piss.”

“Ironically, I am reliably informed that Michael McIntyre doesn't actually have a "man drawer", and invented the concept in order to ridicule ordinary people, for whom he has nothing but haughty contempt.”