When you start doing comedy, you think to yourself, "I want to be a headliner." And you become a headliner, and you're like, "Oh wait, this isn't what I meant. I meant I want to be a headliner that's famous enough that people come see me specifically." And that's a huge leap, because most of the time most of the audience is there to see comedy in general. They're not there to see you.

There's all this evidence that we leave now of our life, especially if you're a comedian or an entertainer. I mean, I guess that was always kind of true, but now there's a lot more. We leave a deeper trail. Like a snail trail of our memories, you know? But it's not really about arousal. It's about artistic droppings.

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.

There were some particular themes that I knew I wanted to hit, and when I got deeper into the project I found that it was becoming serious in and on its own. By the end, it's not very funny at all. I think, now, that part of the power of the book is that the jokes are kind of sparkly distractions.

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'm admitting that I don't know that to be true, but it does sound pretty good. So a big part of my childhood was affecting black culture and black accents and black music and anything black I was into.

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.