I'm developing more stuff in my voice, more Nick Swardson. It's me as myself in a sense and kind of in my voice, no accent no affectation. I'm growing into my own persona.

I always thought that the fastest way for me to get ahead and get noticed and to do well was to make my act very accessible. When I first started, I talked about family stuff, my dog, my cat. It was all I knew back then; I wasn't forcing anything, but I wasn't like, 'Hey, don't you hate doing homework?'

Most sketch aficionados have an enormous amount of respect for 'Mr. Show.' I didn't have HBO back then, so I was always trying to find episodes. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross became celebrities, and Jay Johnston - who's lesser known, but brilliant - deserves a lot of credit, too.

When you live the life of a comedian, it's such a state of arrested development. I can't deal with anything very maturely. I'm still really bad at paying bills or doing anything that would be considered semi-adult. I'm really bad at it. It's weird I can create and run a TV show, but I can't pay my phone bill.

My experience is at The Groundlings Theater, where we created different characters and did sketch comedy. And sometimes the characters were outrageous, but they always came from a real place. So even working there, we had to create characters from the people that we knew.

I've always loved cuneiform; I've always loved the way it looks. I love that it's the world's oldest script. And the creative potential of bad translation or misunderstanding or something has always been at the core of the idea of 'Dirty Projectors.' So the cuneiform is pretty playful - basically, just a joke.

Feature films seem geared toward very large budgets, action, broad comedy. That seems to dominate all year where it used to be relegated to summer.

You can get through very serious and sometimes horrible and sometimes embarrassing and very awkward situations with humor. It gives us a way out.