Understanding listening is an epiphany moment for every improviser. At least for me it was.

I guess that I was always considered a little too weird for the standup clubs and probably too jokey for doing performance art and those places where those are done.

I never liked the glossiness of highly produced standup specials in general - I like it where it has more of a feel of the type of places I usually perform. It seems kind of weird when you do a special to go perform in a place unlike the place where you perform 95% of the time.

People get recruited from sketch groups and put on 'Mad TV' and 'SNL,' but those aren't ensembles, they're all-star teams.

Perhaps naively I thought people understand what humor was, that it was invented by the human race to cope with the dark areas of life, problems and terrors.

I wasn't close to my father, but I wanted to be all my life. He had a funny sense of humor, and he laughed all the time - good and loud, like I do. He was a gay Irish gentleman and very good-looking. And he wanted to be close to me, too, but we never had much time together.

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

In studio films, everything has to be boxed in, everybody needs to know beforehand - this is comedy, this is sci-fi, this is drama - and what's the point of independent film if you don't get to experiment?