Coming from art school, I had a great sense of style - as did The Beatles and the Stones - and I enjoyed projecting that. Image, attitude, great music and great lyrics - that was the '60s.

In my time, we didn't know songs could last. All we ever thought of was next Tuesday. You never imagined a future.

I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.

Poets have a sense of place. My place was London, and I sang about it.

I was living in upstate New York, in Kingston - small town, no comedy scene except for my friends and I doing these DIY shows and whatnot. And we put together this thing called the 'Altercation Punk Rock Comedy Tour.'

I love a lot of comedy movies. I think I fell in love with comedy when I was younger. My brother and I would always sit down and watch some of the classics. 'Bottle Rocket' is one of my favorite comedies.

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

I think that comedy is one of the more serious things that you can do in our day, especially in the world that we're living in.