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.

You become a victim of your own success. It's what happens in TV when Fox has a big hit with the X-Files. And they start chasing and the rest of their shows suffer. Because the experimentation that made the X-Files a show is all of the sudden lost.

Each week we usually have one person who's never done the show before. Last year we had close to 60 who'd never done the show before. We're constantly booking new people, sometimes to the consternation of people who live here who do the show regularly.

It's really difficult to make things, and a lot of times you don't know you're at the end of something.

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 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.

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.