My brother and I both like sarcastic, insulting comedy, so that's a way we communicate. Somehow that's what we learned. My mom is not a really sarcastic person. She's a really sort of overly loving person, and my brother and I came out little cynical bastards.

And as a stand-up comic, that's the one thing I'm a little uncomfortable with. I'm not uncomfortable with sincerity in my regular life, but, like in terms of my product that I offer, I think that it's weird, because comics used to be way more sincere in the '80s.

When I first started comedy, me and my friends were kids. I claim - although I know that it's a spurious and probably untrue claim - that we were the first generation of kids to act black.

Richard Pryor had real sincere and vulnerable moments. Now it seems so cheesy if you stop your act and say, "This is why we have to help them kids. We've got to make sure them kids can read."

I think people are lonely and desperate for attention and unemployed and bored. I don't mean that these are losers that live with their mom, although that is true for many of these people. I think people in general are literally underemployed and lonely and bored in this country because of the economic downturn, and because of the isolation that's available because of the internet. The internet has both freed people up to connect with each other and isolated them.

Oh, my other goal was that I wanted to talk about this area and this time in history. I wanted to talk about growing up in Oakland, a white kid, from this kind of generation of broken homes and listening to hip-hop.

I got a naughty thrill out of listening to music that was that dirty, especially being that young and able to listen to it around my parents. Kids would come over to my house to listen to Too $hort records.