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.

So much of comedy is feeling comfortable with the point of view coming at you. So I understand it. There's people who I find hilarious now, but the first couple of times I saw 'em, I was like "What is this? I don't get it at all."

When people look at the ratings and they're bad, I think people can get an idea of "Why would they even make the show?" And to a certain extent, original programming for any network is a loss leader to try to get you to keep the channel on your cable package.

You have to pay your dues. And what's nice, after booking a lot of new people... I counted the other day. We're in September and we've already booked between 30 or 40 people who've never done the show before.

I find I've always been judgmental about comedy (laughs) and it's hard to turn that off, really. But what constant exposure to live comedy does is it makes you give people a second chance.

I guess when I was a kid I wasn't the type of person playing a lot of pranks. I was the type of person upon whom pranks were pulled.

We have a philosophy of we'll keep putting it up until people get it. We did that actually these last three weeks with Cracked Out from New York. People didn't really understand them. We put them up three weeks ago and they just got stared at.