It never dawned on me that I had the option of becoming a comedian. I come from a little dirt street town in northwest Texas, and they really don’t talk about the arts there much on career day.
Pace, rhythm and timing. Pace, rhythm and timing is what it’s about. The content’s got to be great, but then it’s got to be delivered. It’s a tricky thing to do, and it takes a lot of work.
I don’t know who in my family thinks very fast at all, including me. The things that people see me do onstage are written, so it doesn’t have to be very quick if you have all day with a pen.
You can tell on-stage when a joke’s starting to lose its pop. It doesn’t mean people don’t want to hear it anymore; it means I don’t want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they’ve never heard.
When I was 20, I used to go around telling stories, and I knew where I was comfortable – onstage, talking, making ’em laugh and listen to the weirdest things. I liked being the center of attention.
I don’t like to do material people have heard. Now, they like to hear material that they know, because that’s the stuff that made me famous, and, unfortunately, I don’t do a ton of it.
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