“The Middle East is gorgeous, but again, politically, I would not want to go there.”

Anyone who buys a ticket can just go in there, and I don’t like everyone, so I always see concerts as like, I’m going to get punched, I’m going to get elbowed, I’m going to get stepped on, get spilled on, someone’s going to hit me with their body odor or something.

I think Batman Returns is right for riffs. I love it but it’s the ultimate Tim Burton movie. There is so much that happens that’s crazy and there are a ton of things to riff.

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

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.

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.

We gotta understand that Hip Hop is now universal. Hip Hop is not East coast or West coast.

It’s always funny to me when people meet me. They really think I’m from the East coast off top. When they get to talkin’ to me, they go “Oh no, she’s sooooo Southern”

So it’s easy for me to see what it is. People say it’s all about age, but to me, it’s mind over matter.

The argument is more accurate when one says America is focusing more attention to the Far East.

Gabriel Levin’s book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Arabs can be elected to the parliament in a democratic election.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were revolutions.

I don’t believe in the theory that the United States is reducing its presence in the Middle East.