The fundamental truth guiding social justice comedy is that people are not shitty. That sounds cheesy, but that's how I have to approach it. Everybody has the capacity for change.

I one hundred percent recognize that comedy is a more narcissistic profession and that I cannot directly improve people's lives the way I could if I had stayed in the policy world. But the trade-off is that I'm happier doing jokes.

In general, I think there are some things that require time before you can talk about them. Some stuff that happened over the summer, for instance - the Philando Castile shooting, Alton Sterling, the police officers in Dallas - there was no room for jokes. But there are, of course, the policies that have given us those events. Now, there's a lot of room for jokes there. When you're looking at something difficult to talk about, there's always a sideways way in that feels a little less personal to people. That's where the joke lives.

We're always going to be cherry-picking to make religion make sense. Especially in the modern context.

We twist ourselves into knots convincing people that Islam is peaceful and varied before we realize that, wait a second, you can be a Muslim while also recognizing that Islam doesn't even explain half of your behaviors!

I knew that the black struggle wasn't my struggle. But I felt like it was my-struggle-adjacent, you know? I've always said that if you turn the dial in one direction, a Muslim is a Jew is an East Asian person is a Native American and so on. I feel very much that all of these struggles are kind of the same and - Hillary Clinton actually said this recently - when you get rid of one barrier, it opens up the gates for a whole bunch of people you didn't even know would benefit from it. So not fighting for the black struggle is like not fighting for the Muslim struggle.

The fundamental truth guiding social justice comedy is that people are not shitty. That sounds cheesy, but that's how I have to approach it. Everybody has the capacity for change.