Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn.

This week's show we recorded live in London, England, with a London podcast festival.

We've got great comedy coming up on the show, great music, and interviews with the creator of VEEP Armando Ianucci

and the creator of the new HBO show, Divorce Sharon Horken.

Let's get right into it. Bullseye live from the 2016 London podcast festival. Let's go.

My first interview is with a legendary comedy writer. Armando Ianucci started his career

as a radio comedy producer at the BBC. He created shows like on the hour and knowing me, knowing you.

From there he moved to television, continuing to collaborate with Chris Morris and helping to make Steve Kuggen's character, Alan Partridge,

a household name in the UK. In 2005 he created a show called The Thick of It for the BBC, a show in which Peter Capaldi's character Malcolm Tucker

elevated swearing to the highest form of art, then he created the HBO show VEEP.

It's a loose American adaptation of The Thick of It. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

At this point he can basically build an addition to his house out of Emmys, VEEP won another one for Outstanding Comedy Series this year.

Here's a little bit of his British work. He hosted a show on Channel 4 in the UK called The Armando Ianucci Shows.

Every episode had a theme. The theme of this one was imagination, and in this clip Armando is talking about the fact that in his opinion,

imagination is what makes us superior to animals.

That's why I come down to the zoo at least once a day to laugh at the animals, tosser, and taunt them with things that show how inadequate they are compared to us.

Look at that, it's a pen that writes in ten different colours. You can't even write. I'm asked at this one I was three.

Just look at these birds, obviously struggling with some quite straightforward books by Jermaine Grier, and clearly not knowing what to do with a clarinet.

You know it's our imagination that distinguishes us from the animals because it allows us to come up with amazing complex things like Dundee or Shirley Bassie.

The most complex thing an animal can do is chomp or get run over. That's right.

That's why if you put Shirley Bassie in front of some of us and in front of some animals, we would applaud her and give a singing contract,

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