I was the teenage kid growing up in New Jersey watching the Tony Awards and thinking, 'Oh, maybe if I'm lucky I'll make it to Broadway by the time I'm 40!'

I can get motivated seeing a kid at my son's school overcome a learning disability.

I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful involvement feel impossible. What changed that, for me, was changing the vantage point.

Do you want to have a career that goes beyond, you know, 11 minutes in a 22-minute television show every week? Some people don't. That's fine.

I think my goal was just to do comedy, honestly. It still is. Whatever form that took or takes, it doesn't matter.

Stanley Kubrick went with his gut feeling: he directed 'Dr. Strangelove' as a black comedy. The film is routinely described as a masterpiece.

I feel like comedy had a boys'-club label when we were starting.

My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at - with a partner, doing comedy sketches.