I just find the more personal and brutally honest you are, the more people connect with your material - be it standup or narrative.

So cool people talking about this kind of stuff and having all the conversations about race, etc. since the show premiered. As far as Rachel (and other love interests too), we didn't set out to cast someone white and auditioned people of all ethnic backgrounds, and wanted to cast the person I seemed to have the best chemistry with to sell this huge relationship arc. In the end, Noel blew us away. And, for the writing, I'm pulling a lot from my own real current relationship, which is with a "white" person - so we can do interesting scenes like the scene in 109 (Mornings) about the parents (which many South East Asians have told me really resonated with them and they'd never seen an interracia...[Read more]

[This link contains all the recommended books - there are more than 100] The list contains City of Thieves by David Benioff, Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, and Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang.

My 5 favorite books of 2020: Antkind by Charlie Kaufman Earthlings by Sayaka Murata Little Eyes by Samantha Schweblin Weather by Jenny Offill The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

I’m a big booze bag. I can sink into a Netflix like you wouldn’t believe. I love a good documentary. I like making sweet love to a woman. I like going out to eat and checking out a movie. I’m a big walk guy. I love to just take a walk. No one walks anymore. It’s nice to just get out there and stroll.

It’s crazy. Seinfeld calls it the “kit.” You’ve got to have a podcast, a web series, a TV show, you’ve got to be on social media constantly with Snapchat, Instagram, and tweeting all the time. You can’t just have standup anymore. That’s not enough. It’s a lot.

The worst ones are when you read the YouTube comments. Out of ten, seven are kind of nice, like, “Funny guy,” “Decent stuff,” “I liked it.” But then the last three are like, “What’s up with this guy’s face?” “I hate his pauses,” “He’s got a horrible delivery.” Those stick more because they might be right. Maybe I’ve had those thoughts. I’m not one of those guys that’s like, “Screw you. You’re saying mean things.” I’m like, “Maybe I can learn from this.” We are so accepting of the compliments. Why not be accepting of the insults too? If you’re going to be mean like, “Hey, look at this fag,” I’m like, “Alright. Whatever.” But if it’s, “I hate his delivery,” I’m like, “Oh shit. Maybe I should w...[Read more]

It was probably about 2009. I was getting a little bit of work in New York, but still day jobbing it, still nothing going for me. I was doing a comedy club and she happened to walk in on the one bit that worked. She came in the green room and said, “Hey, I like your vibe. I think we would work well together.” She was nobody at the time. I was like, “I’ll take any work I can get.” We took the train to Hofstra and had dinner with her mom. I was kissing her ass the whole time because she was a bigger comedian who was helping me out. We hit it off and she gave me a bunch of dates and that was it. We went all over the country. I watched her blow up, do TV shows, get on the Charlie Sheen roast, Co...[Read more]

Johnny Carson 1984 Confession of an Economic Hitman Kicking Through the Ashes Feed The Beast The Chitlin' Circuit Callus On My Soul Cheat: A Man's Guide to Infidelity Among the Thugs The Count of Monte Cristo The Westies Sweet Child of Mine: How I Lost My Son to Guns N' Roses My Appetite for Destruction: Sex & Drugs & Guns N' Roses Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN Becoming Richard Pryor The Bible Flag of Our Fathers

This year, I really got into “The Champs,” a podcast in which the hosts, Neal Brennan and Moshe Kasher, will only have minority comics on. They’re both very white comedians but they only have non-white comedians on. Seaton Smith, who’s on my show, just did an episode; the George Wallace episode is amazing. There’s also “You Made It Weird,” a marathon two-hour long podcast each episode. Pete Holmes hosts and “makes it weird” by bringing up embarrassing things that stand-ups purposefully don’t talk about onstage. When I was on it, he brought up a sex story I’d told him in confidence about how I felt like God was mad at me. He asked like it was a normal question that I hadn’t just told him. At ...[Read more]

This was the year that my wife and I discovered HGTV overall. It’s a great channel: They have all these shows that are located in some vague Canadian city and feature who people who refuse to understand that places can be renovated or even cleaned. Every time somebody walks into a house — which is a lot — they shoot the scene with horror music scored over it, and the couple is complaining that the place is dirty and there’s an outlet that doesn’t work. At which point someone will say, “You know, you’re with a contractor who will fully renovate the house, right?” It’s that journey every single time. Unless you’re watching House Hunters International, in which someone is just people trying to ...[Read more]

One thing I never get tired of is the film Burden of Dreams, which is the documentary by Les Blank about Werner Herzog trying to make a movie called Fitzcarraldo, which involves moving a steamship over a steep hill. That's the story they were dramatizing, and in an attempt to dramatize, Herzog wanted to actually move a steamship paddleboat over a hill, and he wanted to do it in the jungle the same way it was done in the script. It’s tense and fascinating because the film crew is in a terrible predicament, yet it’s fundamentally hilarious because it’s a predicament that they put themselves in. No one asked them to do this. I find a lot of life is bitching about having to do something like mov...[Read more]

The Nixon Tapes: 1973 Ed. by Douglas Brinkley & Luke Nichter Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Oh, zero. I wanted to write a novel, but they wouldn’t let me. But there are facts in the book that are true, [like] 'a river is made of water.'

Most books back then were awful and most books now are awful. The classics stayed on. Reading modern books is like you went panning for gold and had to go through a bunch of rocks to find one single lump of coal. Or, the way I do it, you just go into the store and they give you big bars of gold from the old days and you read those.

I hated everything in school. I think it kills people for books. My kid was having trouble with this book, and oh my God, it was a great book. So I said, "Why don't you try to read it once just for pleasure because you're reading it knowing that you'll be asked questions. You can't enjoy anything then." It's like if you went to a movie and they said, "Oh, there's going to be a giant quiz the next day," it'd be very hard to enjoy that movie because you'll be trying to figure out what questions they'll be asking. Of course the books weren't written for that purpose. They weren't written to be taught in school or analyzed in a literary way or anything like that. School killed me for books. I re...[Read more]

In the beginning, you think, I can’t wait to get on television. I’m going to straighten it out. Then people will be saying, “God bless you, Dave Letterman, we have been waiting for somebody to take care of television.” That’s how you feel. And now, I don’t feel that way.

I’m sure it was sincere. But it was artificially generated. The same thing happened to me. I can remember sitting next to Johnny Carson for the first time, and I’m thinking, Holy God, this is like looking at Abraham Lincoln. You’ve seen him forever on the $5 bill. And now all of a sudden he’s here. And that was too much for me. I’m not saying it happened in like measurement, but I understand the dynamic.

Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one’s chest, to sing one’s song. So that element is present in all art. And comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts—it’s a vulgar art, it’s one of the people’s arts, it’s the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form—it’s certainly artistry. So self-expression is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me." Self-expression can be based on looking at the world and making observations about it or not. Comedy can also be based on describing one’s inner self—doing anecdotes, talking about your own fears. Woody Allen taps into a lot of self-analysis in his comedy. But I don’t think the...[Read more]

To me there’s nothin’ like bein’ a stand-up. When I watch Michelle Wolf, I love the fact that she loves to perform. I can tell she can’t wait to write a joke and tell a joke. There’s such an enthusiasm. Just the fact that she revels in being a comedian. She’s so anxious to get out there. She’s like an athlete. She runs out and she punches those jokes. And some work and some don’t, like all of us do. But she really enjoys it. I don’t see a lot of angst.