I would say emotionally we've all turned into these sort of toxic, shallow, angry, polarized demons screaming at each other from across echo chambers. My whole thing is that I'm trying to get underneath the anger into the truth that's underneath it.

life becomes satire in real time, what good is the premiere satire magazine? It might as well just be the newspaper. You could pick up The Wall Street Journal and be like, "Oh, what a funny Onion headline!" And then the editor of The Onion is like, "Huh. I guess you won't be needing me anymore."

I would say emotionally we've all turned into these sort of toxic, shallow, angry, polarized demons screaming at each other from across echo chambers. My whole thing is that I'm trying to get underneath the anger into the truth that's underneath it.

I learned as a really young kid, when my dad was telling me one story and my mom was telling me another that, even as a 5-year-old boy, there was no way that both of these stories are true. Something in the middle is true, and I have to figure out what it is, what the truth is, and I never did quite figure that out.

Who's famous anymore? No one. There are these comedians that are famous in a weird way. There are comedians, like Anjelah Johnson and Russell Peters, [who] are unbelievably famous, but in a way they're selling out 1,000-person stadiums.

In keeping with the theme of "I got my hands on," my brother and I would listen to The Diceman Cometh. That was the dirtiest thing we'd ever heard, and we could listen to that at full volume without fear of penalty, because my mom couldn't hear that either. I wasn't a huge comedy fan growing up, but I definitely listened to Andrew Dice Clay a lot.

I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life.