I wasn't a kid growing up thinking, 'One day I'll get an Oscar and make a speech.' That wasn't on my mind.

I don't think about that. I wasn't a kid growing up saying one day I'll get an Oscar and make a speech. That wasn't on my mind. So what I do is the best work I can do.

When I'm up there, and I know the show's coming to a close, in my head I'm saying to myself, Oh man, you gotta get off and be a normal person again. That's what I don't like so much.

I don't know who I touch and who I don't. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don't have any secrets. I don't know the reasons I've been so well received.

To show that a comedian on stage in India talking about sanitation or in South Africa talking about HIV and AIDS awareness, if you follow the joke into their lives, you can see that, like, oh, these things aren't just contrived in joke books. This is real life. I think the best comedians have that bravery and courage to say, Oh, this is what it is.

In any awards ceremony, if you're a finicky person like myself, you can pick a multitude of things to nag about. I get frustrated with the comedy category because it feels like it gets sidelined a lot of the time for all kinds of things - not sidelined, marginalized.

What happened was, in my final year of university in Australia, there was a campus comedy competition, and I felt like it was something I could do. I won that competition, and I kept doing it, and I couldn't get a job in law. So I just kept doing comedy.

I admire my boss, Lorne Michaels. He never stops producing. I think, for him, comedy is a tool of compassion, a way of rallying people together and saying, 'Guys, isn't the world bonkers? Aren't we all just trying our best?' There's a tenderness in everything he does.