Awkwardness and feeling alienated are always going to be a part of comedy.

Elia Kazan. He wrote my favorite book about filmmaking, 'Elia Kazan: On Directing.' There is a thing in the book that I do every time, it's part of my production structure. He said when you're hiring an actor, ask them what draws them to the project, and don't lead them to the answer.

Failure's hard. There's no way around. Bombing on stage never feels great. You feel judged, you feel alone. But then when your performance works, it's transcendent.

I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn't be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article "Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I'm So Drunk."

I think spending a lot of time with my mom, who's a talker and a storyteller, and my dad, who has kind of a soft-spoken, understated sense of humor, I think that's how I became what I am, which is sort of an understated storyteller.

Fortunately, I don't talk about politics on stage.

I figured out in my thirties it was about 'what can I contribute'? And what I figured out about that is creating something from scratch, and connecting it to people.