This is a very common problem for most comedians. Lemme ask you this - How bad was your childhood? If it was really bad, chances are you're already comfortable with feeling like a failure. So you're actually ahead of the game! Stand up is You vs You so tell that scared little bitch to calm down. You aren't fighting in Afghanistan or battling cancer. You're just telling shit jokes to strangers. Good luck and godspeed. Go for it!

I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of getting out of my comfort zone. I think that’s what you should do. I understand the temptation if you’re an alternative comic to just do alternative rooms. Or if you were a club comic to just do club rooms. Or if you’re a white comic just to do white rooms. It’s because bombing is so humiliating that you want to avoid it. But humiliation is where the growth is. This is also like why I enjoy drinking and I don’t like pot. I feel like with drinking you have to earn it. You gotta get those drinks down.

The thing I try to remember with hecklers is just to take my time and listen to them. I believe it was Chappelle who said, "A heckler's first punch is their best punch." They're generally not clever people. You don't see a lot of scientists going to comedy clubs and heckling. They're just drunk. And mostly women. So you just have to take your time and then eviscerate them.

On 3 different occasions I've had women attempt and sometimes succeed at coming on stage to show me their boobs. I know it doesn't sound like the worst thing but one woman had such a big rack that I was seriously scared I was gonna suffocate to death. Good thing she was so wasted that she almost fell of the stage and another audience member was able to catch her and pull her down. In the end when she was kicked out and I realized my life was no longer in Jeopardy it became one of the best shows I've ever had. We'd all been through so much together and were bonded.

Before I did the "my creeeeepies" bit on Comedy Bang Bang, I did it onstage at UCB and it ate shit so hard. One would think I then wouldn't do it again on a podcast for a much larger audience but I couldn't resist!

It’s a tricky thing [delivering a speech]; no-one wants to come up here and bomb. It’s really, literally the stuff of nightmares. I’ve had that nightmare a lot of times, and I know you want to be entertained, so for me to calculatedly not entertain you in order to be true seems sort of selfish. So I find myself in this push-pull relationship with my opposing desires, which I think is a big part of what characters are and what characters do in real life – people in real life, characters in movies.

There’s a youth hostel in L.A. where they would do shows. I went there when I was still new to stand-up and not very good, and it was dollar-beer night. Kiv and Jorm actually came with me to be sweet and we hung out. The hostel had me on last and I got hammered before I ever got on the stage. Finally, they called me up and I was just eating shit and I looked down at the audience and in my drunk mind it was like, “They don’t even understand what I’m saying! They’re all just from other countries!” I was the fucking asshole on stage like, “Does anybody speak English?” The cardinal rule of comedy is, if no one’s laughing, it’s your fault, not their fault. I was so hammered and bombing so hard th...[Read more]

a weighted blanket, beta blockers and dogs

You’ve said you learned in therapy that your compulsive behavior – eating, sex – is just self-medicating your anxiety. Does having that insight help? Oh, definitely. Once you say that to yourself, “Oh, this is anxiety,” you get to say to yourself, “Why am I anxious?” because when something’s bothering you, you don’t name it, you just start eating something. I’m still going to eat the two Twinkies, but when I start opening the second packet, I say to myself, “What’s going on, buddy?” That will get me to two Twinkies instead of eight.

I purposely do something on air that I haven't planned to get me out of my head. It's like tricking your brain. It makes me feel like I screwed up so I can except that I screwed up and relax.

Being an introvert can hurt you in this business sometimes because "networking" (EW GROSS WORD) is definitely a thing unfortunately. I've gotten better at socializing. A lot of comics reached out to me early on and said I seemed standoffish but I was just shy and afraid haha.

Being an introvert sucks. I get off stage and I’m a wreck again. People always wonder, “Hey, if you’re an introvert, then how can you perform in front of crowds?” But stand-up is perfect for an introvert. I get to prepare what I say to you, it’s all worked out, you listen intently and if you talk, you get thrown out. Then I get paid! What a perfect gig.

I think 90% of comics are introverts. It’s a lot of defense mechanism. Comedy is just preparing funny things, and that’s what we [introverts] have been doing our whole lives, preparing something to say to everyone we have to go meet. That’s all stand-up is, just professionally.

It’s pretty much the fact that I’m kind of a shy person. I’m in the business of comedy, obviously, and it’s not the place to be shy, but I’ve always been shy, and I let myself start to be shy on stage. I kind of ran with that, and it was a bit of a mistake, I think. I started to close in on stage, and it kind of became more comfortable for me to close my eyes and not look at people. First I looked at people and I kept my eyes open; for a long time I did. But then I started to close in and that became more comfortable. Now that’s kind of saaad because now it’s hard to snap out of that. On stage there’s a combination of me being the entertainer and me being a bit shy, so it’s a sad thing beca...[Read more]

I want to sell a show. I’m working on a show now about introverts—it’s called The Introvert’s Survival Guide, and each show is a different scenario, and how to deal with it. It’s a fun idea. Introverts have no spokesperson—I want to be that guy.