My kind of wanting to be funny didn't come from need, necessarily. The closest I can analyze it is that it was an easy way to make friends, I found out. It was just a great kind of social tool.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think it's a brilliant tool to have, not only to have a sense of humor, but to be able to use humor to help one navigate life, and I tend not to be that type of person. I wish I were.
I was very young, and I kind of decided I wanted to do comedy. My parents were musicians, so we traveled on a tour bus. You're in a different town every night; as a kid, you're trying to make friends fast. You try to be funny.
I think one of the perks of getting to do comedy is the ability to hang out with the funniest people in the world.
Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.
I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.
People often can't separate, or can't understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it's a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there's a deep anxiety going on.
I think what is important for things to be funny is if you the listener, or the reader, get a chance to supply the humor of it yourself.
I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.
Most comedy is based on getting a laugh at somebody else's expense. And I find that that's just a form of bullying in a major way. So I want to be an example that you can be funny and be kind, and make people laugh without hurting somebody else's feelings.
Your funny gets developed pretty early on. Comedy requires that you understand as much as possible about the viewpoints of all people and everything that's going on around you. It genuinely requires a true point of view, a real sense of your own view of things in the world.