NISH KUMAR

I just love buying myself presents. Is that a crime?

There's a fear when you're a comedian of just being hectoring, so you do try to fight against that.

Viola Davis is just one of those actors who is never bad in anything. She could be in an awful film but you'd never come away from it saying she was bad.

I have a Stratocaster, which is part of my long, doomed ambition to become Jimi Hendrix.

I'm interested in offence and why people take offence in certain ways about certain things.

My parents wanted me to be a lawyer.

I'm a touring standup comedian so a lot of the time I'm looking for box sets that I can put on my computer to pass the time on train journeys. I have far too much free time for an adult.

I'm sure when alternative comedy started, before which - Billy Connolly aside - standup was essentially a person being racist and sexist onstage, there was also the sense that this was the death of comedy. But it's just progress.

All comedy shows make me feel better about everything.

I spend a lot of time bathing in a glow of consensus but you also have to be willing to say something to people who might not agree with you and take the consequences of what follows.

We were in denial about the extent to which Britain had cured itself of the poison of racism.

During the Brexit campaign there was a deficit of outrage.

I'm quite a prolific self-gift-giver.

The architects of Brexit are a cocktail of lying racists and buffoons. I don't think even someone as cynical as me could have predicted how deeply stupid these people are.

I like having my mistakes corrected, but I wonder if it's because you're forced to have a certain humility if you're not an affluent white man.

When I am on stage, I am often thinking about what I will eat after the show.

I've still got a bit of angst about campaigning for a particular party. I want to write jokes about whoever I want without toeing a party line.

When we were growing up we were all asked to accept ourselves as British citizens, and I still hold on to this idea that multicultural Britain is possible.

In the event of a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic dystopia, people with supplies of food and water could become warlords or chieftains in the social order that emerges out of the rubble.

For many of us, football is both a source of frustration and absolute euphoria.

When I left my family home and had finished university, I stayed in South London but moved closer to London's center, to Brixton and Herne Hill. Herne Hill is a tiny place that is ridiculously overstocked with lovely pubs.

I'm quite good at Lego and Fifa, but they don't translate in the real world.

We've all been there - you find something moving, you commission a painting. I know one wall of my living room is taken up by a mural of the end of Toy Story 3.

You have to have your own internal barometer of what is too far. I try and consider feelings of people in the audience. What you have to try and do is that when there is something that could be seen as a transgression, you actually have a reason to justify the joke.

Every day I wake up and think: 'Am I part of the problem? Am I helping further entrench the political divide? All the raging mouthpieces of the right that I'm furious with - am I just the same but on the left?' I have no easy answers to that.