Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me.

It’s been a very old thing for people to gather together and laugh at stuff. The first comedian in America really was Abraham Lincoln. He used to go to a pub near where he lived and stand in front of the fire and he packed the place every night and he would just talk and bust everybody in their guts. He was just a hilarious speaker and that’s what he did.

People are too afraid of uptown. A lot of people will tell you, like, "Don't go to Harlem. You can never go there. 'Cause as soon as you get there, they kill you." That's what people think. As soon as you arrive in Harlem, someone just stabs you in the face right away. That's people's image of Harlem: just everyone standing around waiting for lost white people to kill all day. "Did you see any? I didn't either."

When I take my kids out for dinner or lunch, people smile at us.

If you have something to say, here's what you do: You write it down on a piece of paper, you go out in the lobby, and then you go home and you kill yourself.

You have to do a show as honestly as you can. But you also can't afford skepticism, because it's preparing for failure, which is useless.

Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.