I think being successful in comedy is being funny and making jokes - anything beyond that is the icing on the cake.

But what's true about comedians is that we've all got a huge hole in our personality. In a room of 3,000 people, we're the one person facing in the opposite direction - yet we have this overwhelming desire to be liked.

Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as clichés or old wives' tales do.

So they've laughed and then they've thought, should we have laughed at that? Well, too late now. You did. I imagine I get more than my fair share of that.

The great thing about being a comedian is that it kind of doesn't matter how you look. It's actually a disadvantage to be too good-looking. There's a Darwinian advantage to being funny. If you're a good-looking fella, you can't be bothered to make up jokes.

TV's not the same buzz. If someone tells you three million people watched the show last week, that's good but, when you walk out in front of 1,000, you think, 'Oh my God, this had better be good'.

I'm a stand-up. And no one on the circuit's terribly impressed if you're on TV. I suppose I've stolen my ethos from Jay Leno. You can do all the TV in the world, but that's a team game, and anyone can be dropped from the squad. And if you haven't gigged in a while, you're not firing, you're not match fit. So I try and do it whenever I can.

I literally can't believe my luck. Torturing Americans should not only be easy, but a pleasure!

As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.