I understand being the first generation of black people who kind of made it out, my parents were very nervous about acting.

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.

I was embarrassed by it and racked by middle-class guilt. But when you're on stage, if you're trying to be something you're not, it becomes so much harder. It's better to be honest and take every vulnerability and flaw you have, and mock them and deal with them.

I think my parents were bewildered by my oddity.

The first time that I appeared on stage, it scared me to death. I really didn't know what all the yelling was about. I didn't realize that my body was moving. It's a natural thing to me. So to the manager backstage I said, "What'd I do? What'd I do?" And he said, "Whatever it is, go back and do it again."

My parents heard me singing and they were surprised because they did not know I could sing.

I was a super shy, awkward kid, and performing was a comfortable and joyful way of expressing myself that allowed me the freedom to do so. The passion for acting grew from there. From the time I was little, being on the stage or inhabiting a character was always where I was happiest.

When I failed and took my gap year, my parents were stressing about my situation. I always loved acting and acted in church productions, but I was afraid of it

My greatest fear is giving performances. I feel I am responsible for the audience BUT I am also scared of them.

I can't now say what it was that originally drew me to performing, because it's very possible that at 6 it was just that I wanted people to be looking at me and paying attention to me. Then it sort of transformed into something that was really meaningful for me. ... It became the way that I learn about myself and the way that I learn about other people.

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy

I was super-excited to do it, but I still felt a little nervous about it and I felt like my parents would be a good way for me to test if this was OK…They’re immigrants, and they understand what’s going on over there a little better than me…As soon as I brought it up to them, they thought it was hilarious.

I didn’t want to tell my parents that I was going to audition because nobody believed in acting back then and our community didn’t think it was for black people

I’ve always been fascinated by different accents and dialects. As a kid, I didn’t go out much, so I would spend my time learning how to mimic people. Once I learned how to tape things off the TV, I would oftentimes tape things so that I could mimic them back—standup sets on HBO that I should not have been watching at that age because they were way too R-rated for my eight-year-old brain. I would memorize them and then go and perform them for show-and-tell, and my teachers would call my parents and say that I was doing very inappropriate standup sets. I was a super shy, shy kid, so that was kind of my way of expressing myself—to mimic what I saw on TV. I was a bit of a weird kid, but luckily my parents encouraged it.