Just believe in yourself and work really hard. And when doors open, take advantage of every opportunity you can.

So I kept it to myself. Then some of my classmates started to come down to the comedy club, taking a girl out, and they started finding out I was a stand-up comedian.

When you're first starting out, you want to keep making good movies. When you're young and you're black, you do a bad movie and you're through.

Comedy comes from a place of hurt. Charlie Chaplin was starving and broke in London, and that's where he got his character 'the tramp' from. It's a bad situation that he transformed into comedic one.

I love to talk about people I've met being an entertainer. All my encounters in life - I roll it all into an hour and 30 minutes.

In stand-up you can go either way. It's live. Somebody might say something in the crowd, you might respond to it. But in a movie you could be spontaneous too. But you pretty much have to stick to that story or that scene or that script, but in stand-up you can go wherever you want to. It's more freedom.

I've got a big closet of scripts, and a big stack of scripts on the side of my desk, because you get a whole bunch. Nothing's going to be perfect, and I realize that; but I am a perfectionist, so you go through a lot of stuff.