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My parents always got a kick out of my art. I was always able to make them laugh. As I got older, I remember the thrill I got when I graduated from making my classmates laugh to making adults laugh. Kind of a watershed moment.

I always performed as a kid to make my family laugh and was more concerned with making kids at school laugh than I was about the lessons.

From the age of 4 or 5, I loved to make people laugh.

My special thing as a kid was to play dead because I thought I was really good at it. When I was 7 or 8, I even did it in the bathroom with a hair dryer in the bathtub. I realized that I was good at it because each time my mom would scream.

Honestly, I was a good kid but I figured out pretty early that I had a gift for making people laugh. I wanted to entertain and when that happens you tend to get yourself in trouble in class.

Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity.

To make my brothers and my sister laugh was the greatest joy to me in my life. I like people who can make fun of themselves a lot.

My goal in the classroom was always to make sure they were having so much fun that they didn't realize they were learning.

As a child, one of my defense mechanisms was to try to be funny. My mom tried to nurture that by putting me in acting class. But I got bored when we stopped pretending to be trees and actually had to work.

Looking back, I remember my family laughing a lot. We were never the kind of people that dwelled on hard times. My family laughs when things are tough. Growing up like that, I got used to making jokes about things that were difficult. So when I started doing stand-up, that's what I went towards.