I used to impersonate people a lot when I was very young. But the good Lord gives us teachers to make fun of first. And then, of course, by college, I eventually graduated to a more sophisticated kind of comedy more people were familiar with.
I think we're realizing that gay people are able to do the type of comedy that we just assumed was for straight people over the years. Whatever old boundaries there were, which were very real and still have an effect on us, in the way we socialize, I think that's slowly becoming less important.
Eventually, all of our impressions will be dead. That's one of my favorite things about Paul F. Tompkins' 'Dead Authors' podcast is to be able to do impressions of people you've never otherwise think to do or get to do. I did Walt Whitman on there, and that was really fun.
Even a liberal city will have a prehistoric homophobe. After a show in Washington State, this guy came up to me and said, 'Your shows was a lot funnier before you started in on your agenda.' I told him, 'Please, please keep people like you from coming to my show. I'm glad you had a bad time.'
I've always wondered if, at some point, everything will snap, and it'll be like 'Alice in Wonderland,' where the delightfully mad people turn into sinister mad people.
