Comedy has been tremendous for me. I enjoy making people laugh, and to be able to make a living at it is pretty spectacular. I was in college, and kind of floundering, as a lot of young people do. I thought I wanted to be an accountant, and after taking some accounting classes, my eyes would roll so far up into the back of my head that I thought ‘I don’t think I can hang with this for the rest of my life.’ Nothing wrong with that profession. My dad was an accountant, and many wonderful people are accountants. It just wasn’t for me. So I switched majors to communication and theater arts, which was a combined major, and it was in that world that I hit on the idea of being a stand-up comedian.

The Adam Sandler movie, The Longest Yard came into town to shoot and I met Adam Sandler, Nick Swardson and a bunch of other comedians. They came to Swig, the nightclub where I was go-go dancing in Santé Fe and they saw a drag queen, a stripper and Annie Lederman. The minute I saw them in person and I saw that they weren’t just these giants you see on the screen, I realized that comedy was what I really wanted to do.

I never had a plan. I just sort've ambled along, doing exactly what I wanted every day of my life. It turned out well. I could easily be sleeping in a ditch now. I'd say always follow your passions. Even if you fail, you've had a great time trying.

By accident. I started making tapes of me interviewing musicians.

The ceiling for comedy in New Orleans is about a foot-high, so you have to army crawl your way through it—it’s that low. New York was no question. I went to film school here a year before, and I just fell in love with the city then, so I came back. In New York you can get a lot of stage time [as a comic], and I needed and wanted that. It was the worst transition ever. I moved here with $800, blew through that in about two days, got an apartment in Crown Heights, got mugged three times in a year, my landlord died of AIDS, and the first day I got into my apartment, there was a pigeon in it, just flying around. So it was pretty rough. I got a job as the file clerk at the film school filing pap...[Read more]

I had a few jobs when I was young. I worked as a bag boy, a dishwasher, a salad chef, a carpet cleaner and a cardiologist.

the last jobs i had were fixing cars and covering football games for a local access tv station. as in driving the mobile van to the field, setting up 3 cameras, teaching depressed grownups and interns how to use them and directing the game from the van and then wanting to kill myself.

I'd love to have a shitty job. I couldn't hold any down. Standup was the only thing I could stick with. I'm an idiot that way. seriously this is the real answer.

i once was a caller for a boat tours company in chicago where i would yell at people walking by to take the tour. that sucked!