The show is a satire, which gives us freedom to do anything we want. Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability. The media is jealous of this freedom.

I like playing really super-intense, live-in-the-moment characters. It asks me to not phone it in. It's impossible to phone it in. Every American boy has spent his childhood pretending to get shot.

I am a man who used to wear the tights. We traveled the country doing two Shakespeare plays for bored college students for about a year. I think I'd probably still be doing it now if I hadn't just randomly decided to go to a sketch group audition. That led to doing improv, which led to the Daily Show. But it was fun while it lasted.

The first year or so on The Daily Show is pretty intense in terms of travel. You're going to the worst places in the country, talking to the craziest people in the world.

Stand-up is a real art form in itself and one that I really think to be good at you have to devote your entire life to. It's the really, really good ones that end up getting to do the things that I like to do: movies, TV shows, and stuff like that. It's a really hard gig and it just never called to me.

Ethanol is, in its pure form, just as much of a sham as oil.

I peed in my wife's boot once. On honeymoon, in Madrid, we were drinking absinthe and somehow made it back to our hotel. I don't remember a second of this, but my wife woke up to this noise. Two of her boots were in the corner, one had fallen down and the other was standing up and I was peeing into it! It was a hole, and it looked like a toilet. She said: "Rob, wake up, you're peeing into my shoe!"