Never trust a television executive.
— Dominic Holland
A barrel of laughs should be enough, but it's not. A good review is official and endures. A bad one is like a tub of Flora. It spreads easily and lasts for the whole festival.
When I do a show, I jot little notes for me to remember, and when the show is done and forgotten, I chuck them all over the car. My wife goes nuts.
Seeing a full room of punters queuing for my show is always heartening.
No one likes a pushy parent, and, 'pride' being one of the seven deadly sins, I needed to tread very carefully when creating a show about my eldest son, Tom, better known as Peter Parker and even better known as Marvel's new 'Spider-Man.'
I might get a break again, and I might get back on telly. If I don't, I'll just keep doing stand-up and doing the best gigs I can.
I am not a natural show-off. Some of the monster comedians are terrifyingly assured, and I don't have that, and that's held me back.
I like to call myself numerically dyslexic, but officially, I am mathematically thick.
Growing up, I was always enthralled by Ronnie Barker. He made my dad howl with laughter, which always intrigued me, and he had the rare gift of being as good a performer as he was a writer.
My story is comic because I've spent vast amounts of effort trying to become a Hollywood screenwriter and made no direct effort on making my son a movie actor.
Stand-up comedy is not for the faint-hearted or the thin-skinned.
I am the first to admit that I have never been a household name.
I don't like false modesty.
I find it pressurising coming to the Voodoo Rooms to do my hour of comedy.
The garden is something I always try to get into, but it always beats me.
All kids should vote - it gives them the opportunity to whinge afterwards because you can't complain if you haven't voted.
When I was a little boy, I was fascinated by the way my dad used to laugh at the telly, and from a very early age, I had an idea of what was funny and why people laughed.
I got heckled by a woman, and my riposte fixed upon her unfortunate hair texture, only for her to remove her wig and reveal to the room the horrors of chemotherapy.
I've been recognised in garages. I'll be paying for my petrol, and I'll see this guy looking at me, thinking, 'Is it him?' Then he'll be looking at my car: 'No, he couldn't be driving that car.' I've actually had two people say to me:,'Hello Dominic, I thought you might have a better car than that, mate!'
My Fiat Multipla is bright green - it looks like a frog. I look like a monkey, so between the two of us, we are a hideous prospect. It's the ugliest car on the road but the most practical, and I would live and die by it.
I even like the Scottish weather because, like everywhere in the U.K., you can't have great beauty without lots of rain.
When I phoned up and said, 'Mum, I'm doing a 52-date national tour with Eddie Izzard,' she said 'That's nice, dear. How are you?'
The house I've bought in London, the holidays, everything has been bought from making people laugh, and if you'd said to me when I was 14 that's how I was going to make my living, I would have smiled from ear to ear.
It's because finance is so baffling that makes being an economist such a safe option. It nestles down comfortably with psychiatry and astrology as a profession where getting it patently wrong is just not a problem - and also, rather wonderfully, seems to have no adverse affect on their professional standing whatsoever.
As a parent, I often wonder what I should be encouraging my kids to do for a career.
Doing stand-up is not normal. People fear public speaking above all other things, and I am no different.
Many years ago, I was a young and, dare I say it, very hot new comedian. Maybe even the hottest of all if the now defunct Perrier panel of judges were to be believed.
It is the natural order of things that successive generations will achieve more than their predecessors.
I am a professional comedian, a published novelist, and a general wit for hire.
Edinburgh is the most pressurised environment to do comedy. You get an hour. There's no compere. You'd better be on the money straight away; you've got journalists in.
How I've fed my kids over the years is by doing stand-up comedy in clubs.
Tom has a gilded life which I have had a glimpse of. Yes, he does travel in private jets.
Apathy in youth culture is pretty stark.
I was spectacularly average at school, while my two brothers did really well academically. But my dad never said I didn't try hard enough. He knew I did my best.
For comics, Edinburgh makes no financial or medical sense. Get an audience; that's the first task. Once the punters are in, simply make them laugh for an hour, and then sweat on the critics.
Because it's such a good car, I think we'll have a Multipla till the kids leave home, which is tragic because I could probably afford a really nice car!
In my career, all my most important breaks have come from Edinburgh. Winning awards, being reviewed, bagging my BBCR4 series and the chance to tour has all come from Edinburgh, which begs the question, why the hell have I left it so long to come back?
Edinburgh is a world city, visited throughout the year for its beauty and history, but in August, it is the City of Hope. There is something very exciting and romantic about performers of all shapes and sizes, honing their stuff for the biggest arts festival in the world.
My job is to make people laugh. If I've upset them instead, then I haven't done my job properly.
I'm a confident person next to the guy in the street, but if you go into the showbiz world, it seems the guys who are most successful are the most confident, and I don't think I fit into that category.
Invest your money safely. Avoid the risky lure of spectacular returns; go for an investment that cannot lose its value. This is why I have put all my spare cash into buying not shares, but thousands of penny chews.
I must say that I am rather partial to funny dog videos.
I just talk about the funny things in my life, and the idea is that my observations reflect the lives of my audience - so people are really laughing at themselves. This is the theory, anyway, and I am aware that in print, that it doesn't appear to be very funny. But it is, and I am definitely funny.
There is nothing quite as loud as the silence of an audience when a comedian is on stage.
I have tried many times to write a TV sitcom - with little success.
It's not cool to be star-struck.
I had a crisis of confidence and ran away from being a standup for a while.
I've written 'Eclipsed' as a funny story. It is completely bonkers.
Where I live in south London, it is a very Tory area, so a Labour vote is a wasted vote. My leanings would certainly be not to vote Tory.
Making people laugh is the only thing I've ever done naturally.
