Julian Barratt

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

With something that's not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.

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.

Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.

I love 'Airplane,' and I love 'Naked Gun' and all those films, where you're parodying.

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.

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.

My dad listened to a load of jazz - Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock.

I don't have any friends with cool clothes.

When things start running a bit too well on the tracks, I tend to derail them if I can.

Musicals are just funny to me.

I write tragedies and things when I'm alone. Chekhovian dramas.

I don't do stand-up anymore.

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 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.

Laughter's good, but it's not love. It's one aspect. One emotion you're eliciting from your audience.

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.

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.

I'm not very funny at all in real life.

Comedians are not well people. Well people are not drawn to creating.

Pain - that is what life is about, isn't it? Suffering with moments of reprieve.

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.

Life without music would be a mistake.

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.

Most comedians are borderline psychotic. It's what makes their work interesting.

I find the pressure to be funny when you're being interviewed live - quite intense.

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 was in a band called Groove Solution. Because there was a groove crisis, and we solved it.

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.

I have trouble keeping a lid on the self-hatred.

My life is divided up into before I had kids and after.

The acting life can be quite scary, really.

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.

Sport doesn't do anything for me. And I don't do anything for it.

Sometimes it takes you two or three seconds to get your head round a joke and laugh at it. With a snot-bubble laugh, it comes instinctively - almost in spite of yourself. It's caused by something silly - like when a little kid says something unexpectedly bizarre.

I want to create a world where all the rules are different. It should be magical to enter.

I can't do jokes. I've always come from left field and tried to subvert conventional comedy. I started as a rebellion against that - albeit a very soft and surreal rebellion. It's escapist.

I'm always trying to do anything between comedy and horror.

Most stand-up is incredibly boring. It's time for people to do something else.

It's good to give people a jolt. If they're expecting one thing, it's important to give them something else. If you do something startling, audiences might at first freak out, but then they start to think, 'This is not going to be conventional. I'm going to enjoy this.'

People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.

We have a need to make people laugh at things they'd never thought about, make them laugh at things that aren't logical.

I am a man who dreams of culture.

It's strange, but something about lack of structure needs a structure itself. Otherwise, after a while, it's like looking at a Rothko painting or a Peter Greenaway film. You think, 'OK, I want to see something else now.'

We used to have to convince people we were funny, and it didn't always work.