At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new.

New Orleans is still the place where you find out that you have a doppelganger and feel lucky - but somehow unsurprised - to learn that his name is Mad Bottom.

A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you.

In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation.

When I got the script for 'The Art of Seduction,' I realised I'd never been in a comedy, so I decided to experiment. What the character went through could never happen in my own life.

I'll come out and say it because no one else will: French gross-out humor is the best. Particularly the illustrated variety.

I always thought that the film would be successful if we captured Harvey Milk, like the way Harvey really was-the personality, the humor, the corny bad jokes, all of it.

I think one of the perks of getting to do comedy is the ability to hang out with the funniest people in the world.