Question: In your moving tribute to George Carlin, you credit him with inspiring you to periodically start from scratch with your material. do you believe that that would benefit most comics? Would a Mitch Hedberg or a Steven Wright -- that is, a comic that does tight one-liners -- be able to do the same? Do you think it would benefit a new comic to start such a practice early? Answer: everybody is different. some comedy is more "musical" like steven. he is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. so it's different. I wanted to do it like george. now i do it like me.

I’m 100 percent okay with it. For a while it was like, I don’t want to be a Moth person. Not like that’s bad, but the Moth is usually looking for one-offs from humans that have one incredible, life-changing story. But comedy’s evolved and there’s something for everybody, and more than ever, my people kind of find me. Of course, in a comedy club, you have a lot of seats to fill. I’m popular in some markets more than others, and so I can feel when it’s like 30-70, 50-50, 80-20 my people.

I just noticed that audiences didn't want to laugh at me because of the way I looked, so I just went with that. It seemed fun to play a villain on stage and I wanted my jokes to be so good that I could just calmly tell them on stage. I didn't want to show any neediness. It was important to me to be cool up there.

I think when you see the word 'clean' associated with comedy, a lot of people think that that's the point of it. "Like, 'Oh he's trying to be wholesome. He's trying to make a statement.' And that's not it at all. There are comedians out there who work dirty who I think are great. But I found that that didn't feel natural to me. You want to feel like you're as in-the-moment as possible. You want to feel real. And that stuff doesn't feel real to me.

I like that the show goes in different and unexpected places. It's sometimes fun to set thing up then take a step back if the business owner starts having their own ideas or pushing things forward. Later this season, I encounter a business owner that actually gets more into the idea than I am. But yeah, I like a variety of responses or reactions.

I was slightly observational at first, going back to my early, early open mics. I was just writing any joke, because I wanted to be a real comedian. But my personality was always there and some of my material naturally became about me — about looking Jewish or hairy or whatever — and people liked that. Your voice and your persona will come out of that, the more you're comfortable with it. So when I tried to fit myself into a Seinfeld mold and I didn't get the laughs, that brought me out. And then comedians said, "Keep doing that." And then it was all about honing it and writing jokes for it. But if you ask me, honestly, I wish I could just go up and do jokes. Boom boom boom bing bing and I'm...[Read more]

Stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it — the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion. If you get to 30 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 70 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd.

I have views, but I think if you're going to do political material, you have to know your stuff inside and out, or you look like a dummy.

It's definitely an advantage to be high energy, but ultimately you want to be yourself. Comedians with forced energy look ridiculous (to me).

I think there's a million ways to do things. there was a pitcher for the Yankees once named Orlando Hernandez or "el Duque" he was a cuban exile. A thing they said about him was he was hard to hit cause he had so many arm angles and release points. a hitter studies a pitcher and watches for the ball so he can time it, but with el duque, you don't even know where the fucker is coming from. Nine o clock? Eleven? And does he let go of it up top or out front? Impossible. I sometimes think of comedy in those terms.

W.C. Fields The Marx Brothers Steve Martin Woody Allen

Richard Pryor. He was literally my everything.

I’d say the biggest influence was probably anything religious. I was raised Catholic. And in the South, there’s such a wealthy amount of Southern Baptists. I look at [religion] a little more skeptically through the lens of someone who is from the South. It gives me the confidence to do jokes about being brought up religiously, or any kind of religion, because I feel like I kind of grew up in the thick of it. Not that any of that has anything to do with the voice I put on. That voice definitely just grew out of me needing to do something new on stage. I was like, “Oh, I know this.” And it was a combination of family members and [that] I love doing this voice. Over time I started to figure out...[Read more]

Chris Rock, Louis CK, Patton Oswalt, Eddie Murphy.

My comedic role models are guys like Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Chris Rock, Bill Murray and Colin Quinn. But as I get more into comedy I’m starting to dig more intellectual types.

Late night with David Letterman, certainly. I still use a lot of the techniques in writing taught by Bob on Mr. Show, even though they're tonally very different shows.

eddie murphy, robyn harris, chris rock, carlin, dave attell, louie

Growing up, I was a huge Jim Carrey and Robin Williams fan, so I knew the whole Mrs. Doubtfire movie, and definitely all of Ace Ventura. So those were my life. I would say those two–I just really wanted to be funny, so I would often impersonate them.

Wonder Showzen. Ren & Stimpy. Jackass. Chapelle Show. Tom Green.

I don't mind speaking my mind, some questions are important others are just lazy journalism. I admire many women but I think growing up I looked up to men because there were more men in comedy - I think my fearlessness comes from modeling myself after guys like Chris Farley or just male comedians.