It comes to me. Part of my leaving the media on all day is a way of…my mind has trained itself to have a very sensitive system of radar about certain words, expressions, topics, and areas of discussion that come up. There are things that interest me more than others, and then there are things that jump out. There’s one thing I learned about the mind as a young man, when I quit school. I read a book - half of it, anyway - called Psycho-Cybernetics. The author said that the brain is a goal-seeking and problem-solving machine, and if you put into it the parameters of what it is you need or want or expect, and you feed it, it will do a lot of work without you even noticing. Because the brain doe...[Read more]

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 just always loved stand-up. It's like magic. You say something, and a whole room full of people laughs together. Say something else, they laugh again. The fact that people come to see that and participate in that... I don't know, it's just like magic.

You know, some people say life is short and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment and that you have to live each day like it’s your last. Bullshit. Life is long. You’re probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you’re gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years.

Do exactly the same thing. Because every mistake you made will give you empathy for other people that make the same mistake

Like I said, yes, it feels good [to be getting more popular]. I didn’t strive to have a TV show. I come from a sports background. I come from a work ethic background — a grinder, if you will. My goal was never to be on TV. My goal was not to have my own TV show. My goal was to be the best standup comedian I can be. Because I knew being a standup is the foundation to go into radio. I mean, back in the day, it was radio, go into hosting, go into being an actor. So I really focused on that. Of course you’d be on TV. I wouldn’t say no. If you’re a comedian and someone comes up to you, whether you’re doing comedy for a month or 10 years, most likely, for the most part, you would say yes. But that...[Read more]

I don’t go, “I’m gonna write a joke.” I just go through the world and see stuff. It’s like I exercised the part of my mind of noticing things, to the point where I’m now noticing things without even trying to notice them.

It’s a matter of easing into it and sacrificing the idea of “this is what I need to know by the end of this”. I’m doing interviews in an audio format - all the things you’re going to feel listening to that interview might not be about information per se, they’re about engagement. If people are caught up with what they want to ask and what they want to know, they can get detached from what’s happening in the present, because they want to get at something else. But if you let things unfold, and talk about nothing, that often leads to the bigger thing, and I’m like “Well, I didn’t need to talk about that, it just happened”. We just have a conversation. And the thing is, I’m not a journalist. I’...[Read more]

I think the first year of the podcast still holds up. I think everyone hates their first 10 episodes, and a lot of people actually take them down and don’t put them back up—mine are up there. But I don’t know, I think the thing the podcast taught me that I wish I knew 10 years before the podcast was how to be a little bit more in the moment of my comedy career. When I first started, I think I was, like, [viewing] myself as more of a craftsman or a writer, and a lot of my performances were very intricately written and not in the moment. I think what the podcast taught me was truly to just be in the moment and not plan anything and know that comedy is essentially meant to be stupid and silly a...[Read more]

I never set out to find my voice. It just happened organically. I’ve been doing comedy 30 years, so it’s hard to pinpoint when my persona developed. I never thought I really had a unique cadence until people started doing impressions of me to my face. As far as advice for comics about finding their voice, I would just say keep going onstage, and it will happen eventually.

He [Joey Scazzola] said ‘Never give anyone advice because you’re only telling them how to be more like you.’ Every time I’ve erred and given someone advice, I remembered that. If you want advice, you most likely just want someone to reassure you of what you already know. If they tell you otherwise, you’ll either discount it or you’ll take their advice and no longer be following the instincts that got you in this to begin with. So either way, you didn’t need the advice. But if you really want the advice anyway, you can get it very easily for free without going far out of your way. If there’s one thing that you never have to pay for, it’s some other jerk-offs opinion.

Everything I say is mean, so that makes everything less mean. If I’m up there talking about relationships and making fun of milkshakes and then all of a sudden I have a rape joke, it would make it seem that much more awful. If everything is rape and death, then it takes the pressure off of those things. People can feel a little better about laughing at something awful when it’s surrounded by other horrible things.

I found it was tough to get people to laugh at the kind of absurd one-liners I was telling when I first started out. But once I’d written a joke where the twist at the end was mean, the reaction was so much bigger. It was just guttural. That was a lightbulb moment for me, and I thought everything should have a mean twist. I think the biggest laugh is when someone laughs at something they don’t think they should be laughing at. It’s just a different kind of laugh, and that’s the only laugh I want from an audience.

My first open mic night in a comedy club was a cross between a tremendous disaster and an exhilarating success. When I hit the stage, I completely blanked out. I forgot every single thing that I was going to say, and I was just on stage like, ‘Wow, what am I going to do?’ And I just started ad-libbing about how stupid I was for not being able to remember my act and everybody laughed, and I just kept ad-libbing about how dumb I was and everybody laughed, and it killed. I killed for five minutes about how stupid I was. And I walked off stage and I was like in a fog. I didn’t know how to feel about it.

Comedy has been tremendous for me. I enjoy making people laugh, and to be able to make a living at it is pretty spectacular. I was in college, and kind of floundering, as a lot of young people do. I thought I wanted to be an accountant, and after taking some accounting classes, my eyes would roll so far up into the back of my head that I thought ‘I don’t think I can hang with this for the rest of my life.’ Nothing wrong with that profession. My dad was an accountant, and many wonderful people are accountants. It just wasn’t for me. So I switched majors to communication and theater arts, which was a combined major, and it was in that world that I hit on the idea of being a stand-up comedian.

You know, you’re very funny. But these people have no time for your cleverness. Just get to the point. (advice told to John by Ross Bennett)

After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.

It’s draining, but it does become a skill. You get good at it, and you start to polish your stories, then you figure out your voice or whatever the hell it is. It’s an art, and it pays well.

You will probably be copying something you think is cool. At first, I was just trying to be loud. My early stand-up was stupid and goofy and loud. A little immature. At 21, you think you know a lot of things. At 25, you think you know a lot of things. At 46, you think you know a lot of things. Turns out, you never know anything.

I nervously ran a bit by Louis CK and he said, “it’s a funny idea but who cares? Every bit is funnier if it’s personal. Make it more about you.”