Your average comedian doesn't know the podcast universe, really.

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

We like to keep the show small. Honestly, where we moved the show to the UCB theater, we moved it to a smaller space. Even though the show has technically gotten more popular. And that is, only because we like intimacy and the ability to experiment more. We don't want to be like, "We can get 250 people in a week. So let's do that. But we have to be careful about who we book..."

I always tried to do cool things.

I would say we had two goals when doing this CD. The first goal is to introduce people who have never seen the show before to the best comics that are on the show. And goal number two is to introduce people that they never heard of before and give you a bit more flavor of what the show is actually like. And those goals are very much in line with the philosophy of the show from the very beginning. It's the very best people who are out there.

I probably felt some sense of relief, because when you're on this continuous production cycle and you're doing a show for a network where they expect you to come back every May or every June, you just don't get time to sort of recharge.

It's so hard to figure out how to end a TV show.