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In places like Glasgow and Newcastle, audiences have a tradition of being amusingly combative. But they're not trying to ruin the act, they're trying to give you a challenge. It's like a cat playing with a mouse - the cat doesn't want the mouse to die, it wants to keep it alive for its own amusement and to be entertained by its struggle.

Oh, the cat I worked with on 'Game of Thrones' was so badly behaved! It would never do anything it was supposed to do. I was like, 'Get your game together, cat. You're so bad.'

When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.

Some comics don't like it when people talk during the set, and it does get a little bit annoying after awhile, but I basically let people dictate what jokes I'm going to do.

Sometimes it's cool to have banter with the audience. Occasionally, somebody will say something, and I'll say something right back, and everybody laughs, and it's funny.

If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute - I've got to have them.

I enjoy the character interplay. Sometimes the audience is not laughing, but smiling, and that is almost just as good because it keeps them ready to laugh.

You can't be a casual observer of something humorous - you have to engage, you have to find it funny for the relationship between actor and audience to work.

When you do something unusual, the audience doesn't 100 percent know what you're up to in the beginning. And if you're doing a character comedy, they haven't learned the characters yet.

There's a sense of spontaneity, and no emphasis on jokes in this show. People generally talk the way they talk in life if you were in this particular situation.