There's no "putting an act together". Okay? A stand-up comedian is an act. You are an act. You breathe and live an act. It's not assembled; it's not-- This is not Hello, Dolly!. It's constant, it's organic; you live inside it. It's like a snow globe. Comedy is a snow globe. You live in it.

As a kid I often heard from my mom, as well as from the teachers in every school I attended, that I needed to behave myself and watch how I spoke. Apparently I was a mischievous little bastard. By the time I started out in stand-up at seventeen, I was careful about my language; this helped me get on television shows and go on the road opening for musicians like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and Kenny Loggins.
But one day in my early twenties, I snapped. I didn't want to disappoint my mom, but I couldn't take the censorship of it all. Some of the comedians who fascinated me the most — Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor — had also felt oppressed by the things you could and couldn't say in public.

Before skits became a thing, stand-up comedy was my first love back in 2015.

Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say "I've got cancer" and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy?

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset. But the ones who were performing were making jokes on themselves usually and now that’s changed. So there are no rules exactly but I think if you see a whole group of people only being self-deprecating, it’s a problem. But I have always employed humor, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion. I mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually, if somebody is isolated and dependent — it’s like the Stockholm syndrome. But you can’t compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly. It happens when you learn something, too. I think it was Einstein who said he had to be careful when he shaved because if he thought of something suddenly, he’d laugh and cut himself. So I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don’t separate laughter and seriousness. There’s none of this kind of false Episcopalian solemnity.

[On coming out on stage] My first joke at that gig was, 'If you're a stand-up, it's good to be a minority because then you've got something to rail against. If you're black, you can rail against white supremacists; if you're poor, you can rail against the rich. But if you're a white, male, middle-class stand-up, it's shit. So thank God I'm a transvestite.' It went down a storm.

Stand-up comedy's also the most mysterious profession in show business. It's completely shrouded in [the] mystery of "How do these people do it?" [...] Only other comedians understand it. It's like, y'know, being a cop or a prostitute: you can only hang out with other people [who] do that.

I watched Hannah Gadsby's show Nanette. Now, it's a really great show, you should watch it if you get the chance. She talks a lot in it about comedy and her main point is that she feels that, herself as an oppressed person, she's often used her comedy to let the audience off too lightly - she makes a lot of good points. I think the problem with stand-up comedy is it simplifies stuff. It's hard to get at the truth when you've got to get a lot of regular laughs. And sometimes I think, am I trying to get to the truth here or am I just trying to tell funnier lies? So for example, I think she simplifies some stuff in her show. She says, stand-up comedy works by creating a tension in the audience, that's then punctured with a punch line. I don't think mine works like that, I think for me the tension arrives in the punchline. My uncle always said "do something you love, and you never have to work a day in your life" - he did heroin. (laughter) The tension arrives in the punchline and the setup line is almost supposed to be soothing, really. People say, don't they, that you only regret the things in your life that you don't do. I don't know who said that first, but it's someone who's never broken two corkscrews trying to get an unlubricated parsnip out of their arse. (laughter) The tension arrives... in the punchline.

The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby … I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don’t remember the first time I saw him.

If you like a daily slight terror, you will like being a stand-up comedian.

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years.

The first thing I want to do [on stage] is: I want you to have confidence in me. Well, how am I gonna do that? I'm gonna take the joke that fails the least amount of [the] time, and I'm gonna put that at the front of the set. It's just tech-- it's scientific technique. [...] If the first thing I say gets a laugh: at that moment, 100% of everything I've said gets a laugh! And now, I've got your confidence.

DID STAND-UP COMEDY for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.