Opening for Louis C.K. during his "Hilarious" tour was a great experience for me. He is the generation just ahead of me, because he started so young. So it's like he's sort of a senior and I'm a junior, in terms of the business. He's done so much - from writing on Conan and Chris Rock to writing and directing movies, having his own HBO show, "Lucky Louie," and now having "Louie" on FX.

Your stage persona is usually a version of yourself, to varying degrees. Some folks do a full-on character, so that's different. But most comics do some version of themselves.

Sometimes it's fun to explore ideas that might make people uncomfortable. If you let it, there's a lot of self-censoring that can go on in the name of remaining likeable, but I don't find that an artistically interesting path to take.

Not that that's the goal, but sometimes these funny insights can also be deeply profound.

Laughing at something is a form of accepting it or at list making peace with it.

It's a constant process of bouncing ideas off of one another and intuitively arriving at the right decision in the moment.

Comedians have varying levels of training. It can range from classically trained actors (like Robin Williams) to people who took comedy classes to folks who just started doing it. That's the beauty of comedy: it's close to a pure meritocracy.