Growing up in the icy isolation of Hibbing, Minn., Dylan, who was still Robert Allen Zimmerman then, found comfort in the country, blues, and early rock 'n' roll that he heard at night on a Louisiana radio station whose signal came in strong and clear.

In the role of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie seemed in 1972 like a strange alien creature, not so much coming from another planet as from a future age. His purpose: to warn us about a dangerous society where values were to be turned inside out.

I was getting calls in 1970 from teenagers, little girls, and they'd say, 'Oh, I like your stories about so-and-so so much. How old are you? 20?' 'No. Older than that.' '30?' 'No. Older than that.' And they'd hang up.

The greatest impact of 'We Are the World' seems to have been the video, which lets us see the singers take their turns at the microphone without any sense of star ego.

You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out.

There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy.

You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'

It's funny, because I was trained as a dramatic actor at New York's Colonnades Theater Lab in the '70s, along with Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. People I worked with there saw a comedian in me. I'm still most at home in comedy.