No way dude. Stick to what works and flesh it out. I don't like when people do new shit all the time. The stuff never gets good that way.

This is the thing. EVERYONE struggles early on. That legend of me being extremely horrible is heavily exaggerated, because I was doing ok and booking festivals, and making it to the finals of competitions 3 years into my career. So if we're talking about me being a bad comedian 2 years in, then that's insane because everyone is.

I was doing five, six open-mics a night, grinding it out, and then I did a show one night and got noticed by one Amy Schumer. I bombed, but she goes ‘hey, I liked that one joke you had, do you want to open for me at the Atlanta Punchline?’ And I was like ‘Oh my God, I’ve never been on the road or opened for somebody.’ She asked if I had about 30 minutes of material, and I said ‘sure’—meanwhile I had about eight, and the eight wasn’t good. But I said yes to it, and then I started thinking about it and I was like ‘I don’t know this girl, do I have to hang out with her? I don’t have thirty minutes of comedy.’ I wussed out and called her and told her I couldn’t do it because my parents were com...[Read more]

[Well] I got out of college. And I - you know, I was funny with my friends. And my friend's wife said to me, you should be a comedian. And I thought, really? I just hadn't - that hadn't occurred to me. And then I went to the Improv, the Improvisation, to watch a show. And as I'm watching the show, I'm starting to think that, hey, maybe Jane's right. Maybe I could do this. In fact, not only am I starting to think I could do it. I think I could be really funny up there. Not only that, I'm going to go up there right now. I go up to the owner of the club, Budd Friedman, and I say, I'd like to go on. Now, I'm just sitting in the audience on a Saturday night. I leave my seat, and I go talk to the...[Read more]

It was seven minutes long. And I was so nervous that I wore a hole in the carpet walking back and forth before the show. It went well. But I saw video of it years later and I couldn't even get through watching it.

I remember making fun of myself for being a commuter and having no friends and being alone all the time. [And] I didn’t bomb. I did okay, and I remember it was just like, This is what I’m doing now. Comedy is the only thing in my life I never had any doubt about. I obviously learned from a bunch of masters, but it always flowed into me. When you find what you’re supposed to do there’s not a lot of thinking. It just is. And if you love what you do, you transcend so much bullshit. My life was really unbalanced before. [How so?] I had found love in my job and I didn’t know how to do it in my personal life. I got to a pretty advanced age and comedy was a thousand miles down the road and every...[Read more]

My first standup set was really fun. I tried it randomly in Spartanburg, SC at a rock bar called Guitar Bar. It was an open mic poetry night and they said it was ok to tell jokes instead of poems. I invited a bunch of friends and acted like an idiot for 20 minutes, not knowing what I should do anyways. It was fun enough to make me really want to commit to trying it. So I moved to DC and that was that.

total disaster. I bombed HARD for 2 minutes.

My friends in my freshman year of college in mydorm told me i should be a comedian and there was a stand up showcase on campus. And one of my friends ripped down the poster and ran in my room with it and said "You are signing up for this" and I did. And not many other people did because she stole that poster.

I was at Emerson College and in ’92 I made a New Year’s resolution: I gave myself a whole year to, at some point, try stand-up comedy. Then the school newspaper had an ad about how Nick’s Comedy Stop was having a find Boston’s funniest college student competition. I went home, took a deep breath, called the number and signed up before I could chicken out.