"Comedy can always be taken the wrong way. If I do a bit that is meant to diffuse racism or sexism, Im not going to avoid it on the chance that a small portion of the audience might take it the wrong way."

Previous Quote

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

— W. H. Auden