“When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je’Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.”

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.

I had to do clubs where street gangs were, had to do motorcycle gangs, gay balls and things of that nature.

I’m not ashamed to tell the truth about what happened in my family. I think that’s what makes my comedy different.

Stand-up is what I am; stand-up is what made me.

I love who I am. I love what I’ve become.

When you’re offstage, that’s the footprint. That’s the man God’s gonna judge.

Fear is not one of my attributes.

The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of.

I don’t need to pat myself on the back until my arm breaks. I don’t need any of that.

Sometimes when you lose you win, son. Failure is just life’s way of preparing you for success.

I have so much respect for what’s funny.

Whatever you hear at the barber shop, stays at the barber shop.

Black audiences are hard. They always think they’re better than you. So you got to come with a little extra to satisfy them.

My daughter was a beautiful child.

My grandmother always told me how you start is how you finish.

My comedy comes from pain. I can’t stand to see someone hurting.

Pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.

A daughter needs a dad to be the standard against which she will judge all men.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

If one day I have a daughter and my daughter wants to be a model, I would never let her!