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

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.

Thanks to the Internet, I think, a lot of hate has moved to more anonymous venues. A lot of people get their aggression out that way. Or they do some drive-by hating—you know, where they’re in a car and they yell something stupid out the window at a stoplight and then take off. It’s just not as involved and laborious to be a hater as it used to be. There’s not as much face-to-face interaction. Facebook’s made ’em lazy.

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.

There's something about political comedy that sometimes closes people off, and my general goal is to open people right up.

The biggest challenge in making movies, boring but true answer is money - you never have enough, so everything gets bootstrapped to death! I learned not only how to be better filmmakers because of it but better janitors, better drivers and better negotiators with cops who wanted to shut me down. You have to get creative.