For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.
There's always someone who's going to interpret my material as racist, but it's not. Racism comes from intent and power. A racist will tell a joke about a group of people only when they're not in the room. I'll talk about a group of people only when they're in the room.
As many of you know, I came from San Francisco. We don't have a lot of farms there. Well, we do have one - it's a mushroom farm, so you know what that means.
That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.
It's good to laugh at times that feel inappropriate.
Some of them relate to farts but they are not fart jokes. They would just be a fart in the joke but it's about something else.
Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.
If the social evolution leads to jokes, I use them.
This morning the electricity came on for a few minutes, and when it did, Jonny said, "Hey, it's a black-on." This is what passes for humor around here.
We're not laughing at you - we're laughing near you
I'm not making fun of it because I want to make fun of it. I'm making fun of it so I feel better. I don't want people to think any time there's a tragedy that I'm going to make a joke about it. It's only funny to me because it's personal to me. And that was always the goal. It wasn't to be this insult person.
