Being around Lily Tomlin has been great, how she treats people, how she handles herself, how she goes about interpreting her character or deciding how the comedy should work.

I was processing a lot of different things and kind of looking over a lot of things and rethinking my childhood.

I remember reading in a comedy book very long ago when I first started, a person said there's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.

Lily Tomlin...I used to watch reruns of Laugh-In and she was always my favorite part. She's this very unique talent and the way she does things has been a very big influence on me.

You're the hero of your own story. So it's interesting for historical revisionism to happen. I had let go of my own story from my own childhood and whatever anger I had and I began to see it from a very different place. It's really easy to be like "This thing happened to me! Look what they did to me or are doing to me." These are such powerful ideas and it's so easy to hold onto them forever.

The Middle East is gorgeous, but again, politically, I would not want to go there.

The alphabet was invented in Iraq, so it's a cool place.