When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.

You pretty much have to be bad at it [stand-up] for several years to get good at it, so there's no avoiding embarrassing yourself.

I'm a dad, and that's really important to me, and I realize now that I'm a dad that it's a major part of my identity.

Some things just strike me as funny. The way things play out just makes me laugh sometimes. It drives my wife crazy sometimes because I'll just be laughing for no reason.

A lot of comics claimed to be political comedians when George W. Bush was in office just by calling him an idiot. For me, Obama is actually more interesting comically, because not everybody can figure it out.

There is a linear way in which black comedians are expected to talk about race by all audiences - black people are like this, white people are like this - and it really is hard to break through that. I never was doing it that way.

The idea we have of prison is a scary place that also houses crazy people. And, to me, it was like, none of these guys were scary. They may have done things that are violent or scary, but these are not people that I feel nervous being around, and it feels like to me that we're wasting these men's lives in prison.