“I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.”

I love it when I come across a word I don’t know. And I would never treat my audience like they weren’t smart enough to come along with me.

So much of a stand-up’s life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

I liked comedy, but didn’t know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney.

I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don’t tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards.

When I was young I thought, ‘Yeah, people don’t see, they’re not recognizing how funny I am, and how talented I am’. And the guys that mentored me were like, ‘

I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to Talk Soup, where I was writing and performing for TV.

So I think the longer you do stand-up, the more comfortable you are. You stop wanting to hide your foibles and instead want to show who you are.

I will say that stand-up is my first love; it’s how I got started and is in my bones.

Pop culture is great, but it can be bad, at times.

I like to be nice. I want to be a hero. I want to save people. Or just kill zombies, because they deserve it, because they’re already dead and they can’t feel it. They don’t have feelings.

I always wanted to be as busy as possible so that if one job went away I’d still have plenty of other things to do.

Comedy is ugly. It’s honest, it’s raw.

I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.

Karaoke is the great equalizer.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one’s own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery.

Whereas regular people tend to run away – because the embarrassing story is always going to be the really funny story.