I was very struck when Min. Farrakhan said if Jesus and Muhammad were here today, they'd be embracing each other. That's a tremendous message that needs to be heard more broadly.

My job is to explain stuff you don't know or already know and have to unlearn. My job is to teach you stuff you don't know that you need to know, stuff you should know. I'm going to take what you already know and re-describe it.

Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.

That kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight.

I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city.

I don't think that an emphasis on the peculiar plight of black males at all suggests that others are not suffering, or that such attention suggests that black men and women feel sorry for themselves.

Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.