My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.
I was raised Jehovah's Witness. I was in Bible school at five or six years old, but I wouldn't say that we were a religious family.
I was often looked at as a leper by kids at school because I was a Jehovah's Witness. They didn't like it - you were 'weird'. And on Saturday mornings, you'd be knocking at their doors. I remember standing there with my mum and dad, thinking, 'Oh my God, I know whose door this is, and I'll have to see them on Monday.' It was terrible.
I took the LSAT the day 'Jersey Shore' premiered, and after that I was too busy to go to law school.
I majored in fashion design in school, and I have always wanted to design my own line of clothing, jewelry, and stuff like that; so this was just a step for me in that direction.
I came when I was in high school as part of a student exchange program with the Jewish Community Center in New Jersey, to Ramat Eliyahu. You come and volunteer for five weeks at a day camp. I was a teenager - I couldn't really appreciate it as much, and now I come back as an adult and I can really get the flavor of the city, and I love it.
It's not our job to choose the best Sunday school teacher, like Jimmy Carter was. It's our job to choose who would defend and protect our nation, who would be the best president.
All of these 'protections' were put into place to provide public school teachers with the kind of job security and cushy work rules that United Auto Workers have enjoyed.
In high school, despite my involvement on four different sports teams, I threw my duties of being a jock out the window and spent my spare time in wrestling training or on the PS2.
My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.
Where I grew up, I could be a punk rocker and a jock. But in college, it became apparent that those two worlds didn't mix. When I brought my guitar back to school after Thanksgiving break, a friend handed me his bass and said, 'Listen to the Ramones.'
To be perfectly honest with you, I was partying a lot in school. I didn't have any good study habits from high school because I just kind of got by on being a jock.
I have great respect for actors like Jodie Foster and Natalie Portman who went to school the entire time they were acting. All I did was one small little independent film, and I realised I couldn't balance both lives.
I'm just glad that the whole John Wayne persona of a man is sort of old school now, because I'd never be able to do that. If that was the going rate today, I wouldn't be working.
In 1980, when I graduated from high school, my goal was to be on 'The Tonight Show' with Johnny Carson at least once before our ten-year class reunion. Our class reunion was in June of 1990, and I was on 'The Tonight Show' in April 1990, so I made it by a few months.
I wasn't drawn to comedy: it was drawn to me - from fighting in school to going to jail, then joining the military and getting into Hollywood.
I would always be the kid that got in trouble in school, that's for sure, for joking around.
I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist - a wonderful thing for a writer.
My parents and grandparents listened to bacheta heavy, the true bachata from back in the day - Juan Luis Guerra, Anthony Santos. I liked the genre, but I remember thinking, 'OK, enough of this.' I would sing Usher's 'U Remind Me' to the girls in school.
As a kid, during the school year, my head was often buried in a textbook or Judy Blume book; the words and pictures were the perfect, barrier-free environment for me.
