I am no kind of philanthropist or humanitarian, but it is really nice to get those emails from all over the world of people who said, I had nothing to laugh at or my son was really sick or my husband is really sick and we put on your DVDs and we laughed, thanks for making the real world go away for a little while.

On weekends when everybody would go to the football games, I would be getting on a plane or driving my car across the state or across the country to go do a show somewhere and yeah so, I never thought of doing anything else.

The best place to find material is in real life. I've always maintained that it's not until the mid-20s that you have enough of a life to draw from. There's nothing better for a comic than to go through some bad stuff - and some good stuff, like getting married.

Family time was very difficult when my girls were little, but I never missed a birthday, I was there for every major event.

I was a kid in the third grade ... saw a dummy in the toy store. In the '60s and '70s there were a lot of those vinyl ventriloquism dummies - just about every toy store had one. Everyone close to my age that I've talked to, especially guys for some reason, tell me that they had one too, but they said they never could do it. So many people come up to me and say that. It was just something that I thought was cool. I started doing book reports with it - I developed the skill. I easily got A's on all my reports. It was just something that a little kid grasped on to - so I stuck with it.

There's nothing better for a comedian than adversity.

But the mechanics of learning to 'throw your voice' are pretty simple. Anyone with a tongue, an upper palate, teeth, and a normal speaking voice can learn ventriloquism.