I am interested in how human beings react to crisis and conflict.

I keep my scrapbooks in the car. When I come to a stoplight, I start looking through my past. Sometimes I wish the red lights were longer.

My first 'Tonight Show' was just one of those things - I mean this seriously - a cosmic, meant-to-be coming together of circumstance. You walk out there to do your first 'Tonight Show': Is the audience going to be hot? Are you going to be on fire? It's like an athlete: Are you going to have your moves at a peak?

The only way I would go back to hosting would be if it were something entirely new. It would prevent me from wanting to host a standard-fare kind of talk show.

I guess the essence of my comedy is to get into a very abnormal situation but act like it's normal.

Music is very similar to comedy: It's all about texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone's onstage doing a solo, essentially it's the same thing as what a comedian does. They're in the moment. They're listening.

Food is sort of like the Jewish sense of humor, a defense mechanism. It is one of the things that helped the Jews survive through 2,000 years of an often very harsh Diaspora.

I would love to do a dramatic comedy. All of that, it all interests me. At some point I want to do my 'Monster,' like Charlize Theron, so I'm buckling up for that.