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

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.

I mostly want to highlight things that feel like an injustice, and that's not really political. No one is going to - or should - say that bigotry toward Muslims is partisan. It's a matter of being just or not being just. So that's why I started calling myself a social justice comedian.

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.

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.

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.

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