I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes.

If you actually do cold readings, it's very close to how people actually talk, because you're experiencing these thoughts anew every moment, and trying to make them come out coherently.

Yeah, there were a few years in the early nineties where I really began to hate what was valued as funny and just sort of what was valued in stand-up, period.

I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.

I can't say that I ever abided nerd stereotypes: I was never alone or felt outcast.

I really had to imagine the kind of person that I would have been if I had never left my hometown... I don't think I would have been a very pleasant person.