It always astounds me that over the course of my career, and having lived in four comedy cities - New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles - there's very few people I haven't run into.

I just wanted to be a good comic and had no sense of show business, but at some point you want the opportunity to write a show about your life.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you look up and realize that you're one of those people you see on the train talking to themselves?

I'm not completely sure we aren't all living in a hallucination now.

There's this whole post-modern, nuevo beatnik, retro-bohemian thing going on, you know what I mean? You walk into some coffee shops, and it feels like you're an ex-patriot in Paris in the 20s. You're like, 'Hey, isn't that a young Ernest Hemingway over there? Yeah, I think it is! Hey, let's go have a look and see what he's writing... It's a Gap application.'

In the sixties and seventies you could probably name all the great comics. It was still special.

I found a great deal of relief and excitement watching comics when I was very young. My grandmother was very into them and so was my grandfather. They had a profound effect on me, so I just found myself watching comedians on the after-school shows: Merv Griffin and that kind of stuff.