“Sometimes you’re not getting the laughs you want or at the place you want but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. It means you haven’t explored it enough.”

I can’t do Christopher Walken impressions anymore, thanks [Barack] Obama.

Being around Lily Tomlin has been great, how she treats people, how she handles herself, how she goes about interpreting her character or deciding how the comedy should work.

There’s a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.

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.

It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.

Laughing is such a pure and natural thing I try to laugh every day. Think that’s one of the most important things in life.

So far, I’ve only sailed in the Caribbean. I’ve sailed the Virgin Island and The Grenadines. I liked all that. We charted some really crummy boats in the Grenadines. That made for an exciting sailing trip (laughs) when everything goes well.

I’m an idiot, basically. I don’t think that I’m a dumb guy, but I also realise that I have access to about 0.1 percent of the information that I need to have a truly informed opinion about half the stuff I talk about.

Why I was so intrigued with Red Skelton was because he was able to make you cry and laugh and the same time. That was power.

It is hard to keep a straight face during comedy scenes. It’s considered really bad form to laugh at someone else because you can ruin their best take. But sometimes it’s very hard not to.

Many of my cartoons are not a belly laugh. I go for nostalgia, the lump in the throat, the tear in the eye, the tug in the heart.

For me, a hearty “belly laugh” is one of the beautiful sounds in the world.