The only thing that was sort of Asian [as a role model] was Hello Kitty. I don't want to model myself after Hello Kitty. She has no mouth.

I get up around 7 a.m. That's very early for a stand-up comic. Then I'll have breakfast with my husband, the artist Al Ridenour, take my three dogs for a walk and commence with my work.

I've spent so much time feeling ugly and being treated as ugly as a result. But I changed my attitude and said, “I’m beautiful because I love everybody as much as I can. I’m beautiful because I have wonderful friends. And I’m beautiful because I say I am. I’ve earned it, and I’m gonna be it.

One place that I really feel comfortable is being a comedienne. I'm very socially inept. There's so many things that I can not do in life, and this is, like, the one thing that I have mastery over. It's my world. And anybody who's coming to the show, it's like they're coming because they know that this is my world.

Your goal is to write that masterpiece. Yello's masterpiece was "Oh Yeah." Whatever I say about the song doesn't matter, because it has a huge impact on how we remember the era.

Where do people get off telling people what to do? It's their bodies. If you legalized sex work and legally protected the sex workers, you wouldn't see anything like human trafficking. All of that would be obliterated.

The stuff I do and say onstage I can do easily. As a performer, that comes easily. But being social offstage, it's not easy for me.