Coming from a very small country, it's always nice to see our own doing well.

I had a country upbringing in a predominantly Maori community, and that contrasted with a very multi-cultured arts community in the Aro Valley in Wellington: growing up around a lot of theatre and poets and writers and stuff.

Anyone who has a parent can relate to this idea of not quite understanding who your parents are or making up stories about them.

With some actors, you can tell, just from their different backgrounds and their different approaches to working, they would have just a natural conflict, just a sort of friction.

I do come across people who don't like me, don't like my comedy, don't think it's funny, it's too cutesy, or whatever they hate. And it's like, 'Okay. That's your opinion. Somebody liked it, so that's good.' Hopefully it balances out.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the 'Boston Phoenix,' and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that's where I first saw 'deadpan.'

The wealthy don't have any sense of humor. It's not like the English, where the theater is perhaps the one place where they have a sense of humor about themselves.

People who would never think of dealing in racial or sexual stereotypes will still throw in a fat joke because it's still OK. Really?