In my own life, hate has consumed me at times. Or envy. When my TV show was canceled, I didn't think it deserved to be canceled because people liked it. It was canceled for the wrong reasons, you know? I was consumed with hate for about a year.
The thing where I thought I made it was when I paid my house off. It wasn't actually a moment on stage - it was the first bit of financial security. It was the first time I looked at my house, and it was all paid off, and I thought, 'Alright. Jokes paid for this.'
I probably get a bit more backlash in Australia than I do in America, to be honest. I was never invited to the Melbourne Comedy Festival because I was too gross, things like that. Which never happened in any other country.
I go to the fanciest restaurants in the world and try them out. I like to see these chefs that are wizards do their thing. I like two types of food: cheap fast food - In-N-Out Burger, Taco Bell, stuff like that - or expensive food. Anything in between just bothers me.
My girlfriend buys stuff from Trader Joe's, and it's just subpar. When you buy a burrito, it crumbles the way a proper burrito shouldn't. Everything's just crap there.
I just eat half portions, do cardio every day.
I do enjoy having researchers and writers around me because I am getting a lot of different influences now from the opposite sex, different races, people of different ages, who are helping write the routines. So I am seeing things from other people's perspectives, which I never really had to do before.
What comedy does, for the most part, is it voices something so simplistically that people will agree with us, and then once you agree with something, you go, 'That's what I think.' So what you're trying to do is try to voice arguments that people get on a side with. So they can use that, maybe at a dinner party, themselves.
If I didn't have a gig, I used to ring up all the comedy clubs across the country and go, 'If anyone drops out, I can be there.' Normally, someone would ring you up the day of. It's just perseverance, being scrappy, being a hustler. The first few years, a lot of it was under-the-table work, so that was good. I think I can say that now.
Comedy comes out of everyone's worst day. No one writes a sitcom episode about everyone having a good day. It's always about someone being locked out of their house or someone being dumped or whatever.
I've never sat down with the intent of trying to shock or anything like that; it just so happens that the sense of humour I enjoyed watching as a kid is the type of humour I try to emulate as an adult. It's not a decision. It might sound a bit wanky, but it's the truth.
I don't believe in gun bans; that's a fallacy that people have, that they think if you believe in gun control you want to ban guns. That's not true.
There's a fallacy with stand up comedy, which is, people come up to comedians, and they go, 'You say what I think but I'm not brave enough to say,' and that's not particularly true.
The difference between comedians and the general public is that we are meant to be funnier. And when you've got politicians giving material so easy that the general public is doing it, what is the necessity of us anymore?
You've got to gamble on yourself. If you don't, no one else is going to. It's very hard when you're poor to turn down money. When you've got money, it's easy. When you're poor, you need money today. People take advantage of poor people.
I always thought I was a good person, a decent person. I never harassed anyone or touched anyone. And you say to yourself , 'Oh, that's good enough,' but yes, I had certain jokes that I always assumed the audience would understand. This is Persona.
Nixon started auditing late-night show hosts because they were making jokes about him. Then, every single one of their staff got tax audits.
I've actually phased out the misogynistic jokes because I used to think that everyone knew that I was joking.
I never do a whole new set of new material. I do one new joke at a time, and I wedge it in between two good jokes. Or if it's a long story, I don't do it in L.A. or New York; I do it in Kansas and Omaha, all these places I'm going this weekend.
I don't think that I am a Lefty in the sense that I grew up in countries that have a universal health-care system, but I also think that I'm a little Right in other directions. I also think that - in regards to the whole health-care thing - that yeah, they should repeal and replace Obamacare with universal health care.
