Laughter's good, but it's not love. It's one aspect. One emotion you're eliciting from your audience.
— Julian Barratt
I'm not very funny at all in real life.
I can act with either eye, but you've got to be twice as good as an actor to act with one eye. You need to put all your emotions just through one eye and really punch it out of that eye. I found it quite difficult to do at first, and then I found a technique that allowed me to act with one eye, which I patented.
I always dreamt of being in 'Kerrang.' That was my ambition. I read that religiously when I was into heavy metal. Then the jazz magazines took over.
I was in a band called Groove Solution. Because there was a groove crisis, and we solved it.
My life is divided up into before I had kids and after.
I could say I'm a writer or that I'm a musician but I don't really do music; I do music to go with things I'm developing. Then I do act in a few things, but I'm not really an actor. I'm not a comedian, but I am known for comedy. I just don't know. I feel like I'm a slightly interdisciplinary jack of all trades.
Not really a good idea to eat things fans have made because you don't know what state of mind they were in when they made them.
With something that's not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.
I love 'Airplane,' and I love 'Naked Gun' and all those films, where you're parodying.
My dad listened to a load of jazz - Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock.
Musicals are just funny to me.
If the 'Boosh' was a bit more of a specific thing, or less multi-limbed, we would probably have done it and moved on.
I've done interviews in the past where, apparently, I didn't give the journalist any eye contact. I'm a bit shy, yes. I've thought about refusing to do any press at all.
Performers often can be quite socially inept, you know? And even great comedians are like that.
Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.
I've been a horror fan pretty much in the sense that my sense of horror and my sense of humor were both equally kindled by films as a kid.
I want to do things or write things that make people feel a bit more beautiful or tragic or something because there are so many other things than just funny.
Comedians are not well people. Well people are not drawn to creating.
Life without music would be a mistake.
I find the pressure to be funny when you're being interviewed live - quite intense.
I remember films I made at university, which are unbelievably pretentious. Poetry that I'd written that I delivered to camera, against a Venetian blind, strong shadows, looking slightly off-camera.
The acting life can be quite scary, really.
You don't need a high concept to make a great film, of course. 'Withnail & I' is not - it's probably not much on paper, but it's one of the funniest films ever made.
Sometimes, you write things that sound really great when you're at home but don't work when you shine the light of an audience on them. Great writing and live writing are two separate things.
We did have that, in the background of the character and the show, 'Mindhorn,' set on the Isle of Man, that every episode they would have to mention the temperate microclimate of the Isle of Man.
If you come away from a show thinking of an image, that's as good as remembering a joke. A lot of those shows, like 'The Office,' they are brilliant, but they're not visually interesting.
I don't have any friends with cool clothes.
I write tragedies and things when I'm alone. Chekhovian dramas.
Most comedians are borderline psychotic. It's what makes their work interesting.
I've got a lot of friends with whom I discuss jazz.
For me, there's no dichotomy between being shy or a performer, because I think it's more a way of slightly presenting a version of things to the world.
I did try and do some spooky stand up once, and some of my stand-up had - I tried to do some horror stand-up, but it didn't really work very well.
We just thought of 'Boosh' as an extension of our childhoods in a way, the stuff we had grown up on and loved: 'Monty Python,' The Goodies, Frank Zappa. It spoke to a certain type of person, and we just carried on doing it.
I'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.
Pain - that is what life is about, isn't it? Suffering with moments of reprieve.
Writing can make you feel a bit psychotic. You create a world, and you're sitting inside it all day long, talking to people who are not really there.
I thought I could see how standup worked. I never thought of being an actor - or anything else, really - but I thought, 'I can see how you get on stage and tell jokes.'
I have trouble keeping a lid on the self-hatred.
It's a weird profession, as I don't really consider myself an actor. I did at one point, and I went and started doing auditions, and I was so useless at them and so demoralised by doing audition after audition and not getting them and also not being able to take it in my stride at all. I just felt crushed and worthless.
Me and Noel went to HBO once and pitched this really ludicrous idea about us driving around in a haunted car, and they just stared at us. Literally stared at us! It was awful. Luckily, we were together, so we could laugh about it, but if we were on our own, it would have been one of the worst moments ever.
We should send a load of bad celebrities to colonise Mars. They would have to mate in space, and then their children would be sent back to Earth in 50 years' time.
Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.
My dad wanted to be a musician, so when I started playing guitar, he was like, 'Go for it.' That is what I did for ages; I was in bands. And then I went to university and got into comedy somehow.
When things start running a bit too well on the tracks, I tend to derail them if I can.
I don't do stand-up anymore.
I like the countryside. I like chopping wood. I'd like to be a carpenter.
I don't like talking about myself; I'm not good at analysing myself. I don't want to analyse myself.
I think with performing, initially I was terrified on stage, absolutely terrified. And I did it again and again and again, and I learned sort of how it works, and then I was able to do it.
I liked horror and comedy, basically, from a young age, but I just ended up getting into comedy because there was - I could do stand-up comedy, and that was my way into this business, and then there was no stand-up horror, and I didn't know how to get into that world.
