Our solution on 'The Simpsons' is to do jokes that people who have an education, or some frame of reference, can get. And for the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, 'D'oh!'
Bangkok is one of those places where it's so rich and full of tradition, but they're so open to different people - different gender expressions and gender identities. As a gay man, I never once felt uncomfortable there. As a black man, I never once felt uncomfortable.
If you are in Bangkok, you will find that people there will never speak to you without joining their hands. It's not that they are speaking to you like that because you are tourists. They even speak at their home like that.
I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.
The fact of the matter is that fewer people in Tokyo are able to do business in English than in many other big Asian cities, like Shanghai, Seoul or Bangkok.
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.
What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.
I began my work in the '70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped ringing true for me, as I saw the misery of people living all around me.
If everyone wants to eat like people in Bangladesh, then we would have food coming out of everybody's ears.
Brazil is a country that has rich people, as you have in New York City, as you have in Berlin or in London. But we also have poor people like in Bangladesh or in African suburbs.
Bangladesh are a good side. I think people underestimate them.
People complain about the rich-and-poor divide. It's crazy, no doubt about it. But what gets me is that today, a billionaire or head of state on their smartphone has the same direct access to information as a homeless person has on a smartphone - or a person in Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea.
There have always been difficult situations for activists in Pakistan. In the 1960s, people fought for linguistic and ethnic rights in relation to the Bangladesh movement and the struggle of the people in the western Balochistan province.
When the Bangladesh war happened, people in Pakistan who did not support it were called unpatriotic. My father was in the jail at that time, and a lot of those who knew my family used to call us children of a traitor.
George W. Bush is always protesting that he has the fate of the world in mind and bangs on about the 'freedom-loving peoples' he's seeking to protect. I'd love to meet a freedom-hating people.
One time I tried bangs, and people just weren't feeling it at all, but it's my hair. It's my unicorn mane, and it's definitely very important to me. It's also my body, and so I don't really care about other people's opinion of it.
In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs - monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism - have been working their way through the culture ever since.
I'm very proud that I was always able to be myself and didn't really care what people thought when I wanted bangs with my little Con-Air curling iron, and I wanted to wear glitter on my eyes and rings on every finger and charm necklaces that look like I was wearing baggage while I skated. But I do look back, and man, those '90s bangs.
We have to find a way to try and reconcile our beliefs - and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has traditionally seen homosexuality as a sin - with the reality of life in modern, pluralistic, secular societies in which gay people cannot be wished away or banished from sight.
