Definitely. I kind of hate when I hear a performer who says they "never get nervous." I just don't believe that.

I did the Edinburgh festival years ago. I did a joke about being a germaphobe. After the show a woman approached me and handed me a stack of high-end moist towelettes, the kind that come in scents like Eucalyptus and spearmint, and sell at Whole Foods for $15. I thanked her and made a "joke" about her sending me a case. She sent me 20 bags!

Dave Attell, Doug Stanhope, Patrice O'Neal, Maria Bamford, Sarah Silverman, Louis CK (he funded my special), Andy Kindler, many more who I'll think of later.

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

You need to steal things at work. People are going to think I don’t mean them, but I do. This is addressed to you. If there are people you hate at work go into the break room, find their lunch in the refrigerator and put it in the freezer.

What’s more important than making a crowd laugh is to make the lady at the ticket counter at the airline laugh when the flight’s oversold, cancelled or the weather’s bad. If you can make her laugh when everyone else is giving her shit, it’s way more satisfying.

If you ask yourself, `Is there anything I can do to get a laugh?’ you can find a lot of things. And usually they’re things that other people have found. But if you take something that’s never going to work and you go, `Wow, I wonder if there’s any way I can get somebody to laugh at this?’ it’s a great challenge.

Years ago I did a show at UNH in New Hampshire. I don’t do college shows anymore, and this is why. I’m doing a show and I did an old joke of mine where I said, “I read that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities. Which is funny, because shouldn’t you not call them minorities when they get to 80 percent? Like you could take a white guy to Africa and he’d be going, ‘Look at all the minorities. I’m the only majority.'” Whatever. So that was the joke. And I was at UNH, the University of New Hampshire, and when I got to the part where I said 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities, people booed me. Hissed. And I said, “What’s the problem?” And someone just said, “You’r...[Read more]

[In reply to Louis CK, who was leading a discussion about the importance of maintaining a physical training routine and its relation to comedy] Louis, I concur that poor health leads to sloth and effects your creativity.
Repeating any behavior continually will effect your writing as it gives 
you nothing new to say. I do drugs, yes I do but I only do them socially. Its the fact that I
 talk openly about it that gives the impression that there is a
 frequency. I’ve probably done mushrooms 6 times this year, acid once
 (poor quality), coke maybe 5 or 6 times, and about three xanax a week
to sleep. I dont smoke pot. So smokes and drink are about my only habits and the cigarettes 
certainly n...[Read more]

For me, it’s not really about weight loss. Training just makes me sharper and mostly increases my endurance. let me put it to you all this way: Trying to be a standup comedian for 
a living, or beyond that, trying to pursue a life in comedy that has
 longevity and bredth, is crazily hard. Lots of folks say it takes 15, maybe 20 years to make a great comic.
 Lots of people start out with a lot of talent but by the time they hit
 that many years they’ve given up, become bitter and crusty or have died 
from ill health and depression. Outside of all that, it seems to me that if you’re trying to do
 something extraordinary, which succeeding as a comedian is, if only by 
virtue of the fact that...[Read more]

[In response to Louis CK's question: Are you a healthy comedian?] I try to do coke a couple times a month to get my heart rate up though Viagra can really get the ticker running at high speed especially if you are trying to come while you’re extraordinarily drunk. Cialis to a lesser extent but for a longer duration. Often times on the road I will take very long walks when I wake up and
 don’t know where I am and need to get back to my hotel. Terror can at times be a great replacement for a sauna to help you 
sweat out the toxins. Sushi is very healthy I’ve heard and will help clean out your system 
the longer you leave it sitting around before consumption. Dry heaves
 help keep the abs ti...[Read more]

[Are you a healthy comedian? - Louis asked this question to those in the "Alt Standup Comedy Google Group"] I know a lot of you out there have a diet that consists of Hardees and Taco Bell with the occasional frozen buffalo wings heated up in the condo microwave, and that your exercize regimen… doesn’t exist. Personally, one of the reasons I chose standup as a life is because it allowed me to lie on a floor for several hours eating lard and crying, only having to pull myself together for an hour a day or so. But if you want to have any longevity as a comedian, or if you want
 your brain and body to provide you with any consistent creative flow, 
you have to eat somewhat right and do some ex...[Read more]

Go to the open mic and befriend whoever intimidates you the most and just work as hard as they do. It’s what helped me. I always had this group of people I could call and be like, should I stay at home and write? And they’d be like, you’re bullshitting yourself. Stop avoiding it and go to the mic.

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.

It hasn’t always been this way but I feel really lucky that I’ve been able to get here because when you’re in the trauma, you’re just seeing red. You have no idea what’s going on but comedy has really helped me get to this point. I can’t imagine another job that could’ve helped me the way that comedy has helped me work through all of this. I think my trauma response is telling jokes and that is what’s fun about comedy. I can take these really tragic events and I just can’t be mad at what happened because I have this creative outlet that I might not have had if I was sitting in math class paying attention. It’s the dents you have that make you unique and I love being able to do comedy about a...[Read more]

Ali Wong's entire Netflix special is my favorite joke. It's just so real and so funny and so perfect.

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.

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.

Favorite comedy movies: Naked Gun, Airplane, Caddyshack, Dumb and Dumber, MacGruber and most recently, Goon. Serious movies: King of New York, No Country for Old Men

Lots of different stuff. I listen to a lot of Alt Nation on XM radio. Loved the new Portugal, The Man album. The new Kanye is great. I've had Grimes "Oblivion" stuck in my head for a week. I'm all over the place.