“Every laugh is not equal. They come from different places. That’s sort of the challenge I go towards, making sure the laughs are for the reasons I want. It becomes a back and forth dance with the audience.”

I just got diagnosed with tendonitis which is such an insulting diagnosis. Just point to my shoulder and say “old.”

Sometimes I have young comics that ask me, “What should I do when I meet an agent or a manager and they ask me stuff?” And I say, “Well, they always usually ask, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years, 10 years, 15 years?’ And it’s good to have an answer for that.”

The audience is not your boss. They are your collaborators and when you collaborate with someone you don’t have to listen to everything they think or say.

If you’re driving down the street, you keep the neck forward. So that way you can clear out the lanes.

Netflix is very protective with their information .

The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.

I am afraid of abandonment, and, if you will, in a really existential way, being exposed as a fraud. Everyone’s afraid of it, and I definitely am. This is a fear that motivates. Oh, and heights. And getting stabbed.

You can fit two United States and maybe a third one into the entire continent of Africa, but on a map we make the entire continent of Africa look like the size of the United States, which is why a lot of people don’t know that Africa is a continent. They think it’s a country because it looks as big as we do.

I read recently that I was born in Arizona. I wasn’t born in Arizona. I was born in New Mexico, but I can understand why people might confuse those two Southwestern desert states.

The album [Blaxistential crisis] artwork is by a friend of mine who is a brilliant artist named Sara Pocock. We’ve been friends for a couple of years and she worked with me on the animation. I believe she’s still working over at BuzzFeed.

I was processing a lot of different things and kind of looking over a lot of things and rethinking my childhood.

One time I was really close to Steve Martin. I was too afraid to actually go talk to him, but I’ll count that as meeting.

When you’re a young comedian the first thing you want to do is get a laugh.

I’m working with a lot of legends who are brilliant who are people I’ve looked up to from a very young age.

First of all I love Empire Records and That Thing You Do and all the movies he did from that era. He hates when I bring that up.

Shrimp are the insects of the ocean. They’re bottom feeders. So they’re delicious, but they’re the bugs of the sea.

I find inspiration everywhere. I love challenges and my favorite thing is to find something ridiculous and be like “if it’s all that I have available to me, I am gonna make it look the best that I can”.

I certainly want campaign finance reform. I just wish this would do it in a way that would stand up to a constitutional challenge.

Presumption should never make us neglect that which appears easy to us, nor despair make us lose courage at the sight of difficulties.

One of the things that I learned is that you never truly know yourself until you challenge yourself.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Anton Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

What is genius, anyway, if it isn’t the ability to give an adequate response to a great challenge?

It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don’t pop into mind when one sees one.

You have to meet all of the challenges, big and small. Because how you start is how you finish.