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My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.

With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.

In all seriousness, it really should be difficult for me to be too strange. After all, a great family raised me.

My father was very sick around the time I was born. The doctors thought he wouldn't live. He did recover, but I don't remember him as very active. I do remember lots of schtick around the dinner table. Generally, he and my brothers and I were all laughing at the same thing my mother did not find funny, whatever that was.

I was funny around my family. My family, they're pretty funny, too.

My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.

They have had such a crazy life living with me as their dad. Not crazy but different from their friends.

I thought my family was really funny. Everybody in my family was funny. My mom and dad both have great senses of humor and really saw the funny in stuff, so I think that's probably where it came from. I always try to see the funny in things.

When Dad died in 1998, it really hit my confidence - he'd helped me write and he thought I was really funny, but since he'd died I didn't feel right. And it felt like no one but me even remembered him.