Light and funny has a more compelling quality when you're younger. But I haven't abandoned the genre: I love falling down I love Lucille Ball. It's just that a lot of those stories revolve around problems that I can't convincingly portray at this age.

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.

When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them, 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

Actually I never did stand up. I'm not that funny.