I've had times where I've joked, like, 'I'm going to move to Vermont and become a painter.' And sometimes that joke felt like, 'Oh that's a good idea.' But it was only, like, a daydream for a moment to, like, escape.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.
I'm always in situations where you can't be funny, and yet I want to do it anyway.
It's always good to take something that's happened in your life and make something of it comedically.
Someone said to me at a party once, 'Oh, yeah, you're a comedian? Then how come you're not funny now?' And I just wanted to say, 'Well, I'm just going to take this conversation we're having and then repeat that to strangers, and then that's the joke. You're the joke later.'
As a comedy writer, I'm always praying for the day I can tell a self-aware/break-the-fourth-wall style of joke.
I always make the joke that I go home, to one of my homes, to go and do laundry so I can go on the road again.
I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.
I couldn't deliver a joke if you asked me to. It would have to be live and spontaneous. And that's what I was able to have in New York, at 9 o'clock in the morning, and people all over the country seemed to respond to it.
Once an actor told me he went to the Shakespeare School of Acting, and I said, 'I went to the Shakespeare of Acting, too' and he said, 'Oh really?' And I said, 'I went to Shakespeare Elementary School in Chicago.' He didn't take the joke well, he didn't laugh and didn't think it was funny - I thought it was funny. It's all the same to me.
I used to joke that I wanted to go to the moon, but I actually do. Like, some day I think I'm going to go to the moon. That would be cool.