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My real name is Joseph Herbert. My dad is white; my mom's Asian, Filipino. And when I started stand-up 22 years ago, I used to go up as Joseph Herbert, and I would just have to defend my name. Every time I went onstage, it was so annoying. People would heckle.
It's not that I think weddings - or marriages - are letdowns. It's just that I want to see my wedding as one awesome achievement on a continuum of achievements, all of which were, in their way, just as beautiful and profound for having led me to the current one.
I've been to the Bahamas. It's a beautiful country with truly excellent people. When I took a cruise that docked for a couple hours in Nassau, it mostly reminded me of a giant version of my grandmother's neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama... but with better accents.
I love storytellers. When I was growing up, my inspirations were watching Eddie Murphy, Dennis Wolfberg, and Louie Anderson. These guys were great at telling stories, and I made that my own style, talking about things that happened to me and trying to make them funny.
I learned from my dad's mistakes. I think that's why I'm so into my son. I bring him lunch every day: McDonald's, Taco Bell, whatever junk food a kid likes, I will bring it for him. I've canceled gigs so I could be at moments for him. That wasn't a big thing for my dad.
We could do something set in the 21st century, where I travel around to lots of different places and we talk to different ethnicities and lots of different racial and religious minorities, so it's not just the black-and-white America; it hasn't been that since the '90s.
With Comedy Central, they produced it and did everything - I just had to walk up there and tell the jokes - whereas with Netflix, I was heavily, creatively involved, from the logo to the lighting of the room to selecting the venue to selling the tickets and promoting it.
My brother had a mustache, and when my brother had a mustache, it was cool. When I had a mustache, everyone just assumed I'm an immigrant and I don't speak English, which is fascinating. It was a fascinating thing to discover how I looked versus my brother with a mustache.
There's nothing more fun than seeing the things that you dreamed about when you were a kid come true. I'm headlining an iconic theater in New York City during the New York Comedy Festival. When you're starting off as a comedian, you don't think that's ever going to happen.
Knowing that more people associate Chicago with street violence than generosity is difficult for me because, despite all my proclamations of being from the Bay Area, I have spent much of my life in Chicago. So I have a deep love and a pretty good understanding of the city.
America loses so much of what defines it if you subtract the Chinese influence. I know this because I spent 12 years living in one of America's most popular tourist destinations: San Francisco. And it would not be one of America's top tourist destinations without Chinatown.
I would love to get married, first of all, from my children's perspective. People don't think of children when they think of gay marriage, but I do have children, and for them to see their family validated as other families are validated and protected by our government, yes.
Portland is often trumpeted as being one of America's coolest, hippest cities. I've been to Portland many times, and I'm always like, "Yeah it's cool and hip, but also, where are all the black people? Why is this city so cool and hip, and also keeping the black people away?"
There's an elitism that comes out with the entertainment industry. I'll talk about some shows, but I'm not gonna say that you're dumb for watching one over the other. I just let it go. I don't have to declare a fatwa on any of these things. I've gotten over some of my elitism.
Growing up in the Midwest, Boston, and Alabama, I didn't know any Puerto Ricans... at least, I didn't know if I knew any Puerto Ricans. The only Puerto Rican that I had ever even heard of was Juan Epstein, one of the students from the classic 1970s sitcom 'Welcome Back, Kotter.'
Since its inception, the government has broken and coerced treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes. And this is even worse when you realize that the native peoples of this land are negotiating for land that is, by all common sense and elementary school logic, their land.
I find it extremely ironic that Bush says that personal opinion should not be a tool in the interpretation of the Constitution, when he's the one who's lobbying for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. If that doesn't stem from personal opinion, I don't know what does.
I'm not sure when exactly I knew I was funny, but I always knew I was different. I never had an 'edit' button and would say whatever came into my head. Most of the time, what came out of my mouth was the very thing everyone else was thinking - but too polite or afraid to verbalize.
I remember the first time I heard a co-worker refer to himself as a foodie. It immediately irritated me. Was he implying that he appreciated food more than other people? That his love of eating was somehow more evolved than mine? Don't all people love the thing we can't live without?
I see an insidious problem in the marketing of weddings as 'the happiest day of your life.' The pressure that is placed upon this event to be the alpha and omega of your entire existence makes it, I think, into a kind of nuptial New Year's Eve, and we all know how that usually turns out.
New Zealanders are so chill. I know they say Australians are chill, and I feel like Australians are chill, but I keep thinking, "If they get drunk, they would commit a hate crime." Now that is an extreme position to take, but it's just a feeling I get. New Zealand people, I don't see that.
When I go to a bar or a party, I feel like a student invited me to the kegger, and I actually ended up going. And everyone's shocked: "Oh, my god, professor, I didn't know you were actually going to come!" That's me in any circle, really, especially when I hang out with my brother's friends.
I always told myself I'd never be like my mother if I had a kid, but here I am, the same thing. I don't know how this happened. The same type of disciplining, the same kind of forcing him to perform in front of people, not buying him things when I could afford whatever he wanted - it's crazy!
My desire for my own sitcom began as a little girl - I spent hours lying on my belly on the shag carpeting getting lost in the world of the '70s sitcom. All I wanted to do was run away to the Brady house, The Partridge Family bus; even the project on 'Good Times' seemed better than Clark, NJ.
I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.
Heckles always vary. I mean, some people are just drunk, and it's nonsense, or, you know, some people just want to just repeat something I've said or add their own two cents about an opinion, but because of the nature of what I do and who I am, like, I also get the racist stuff, which is hard.
I want to write my own stuff, and, you know, it would be nice to put myself in it. But I would like to hope that there are going to be better roles offered as well and that I don't need to do everything. You know, like, I appreciate my career being somewhat DIY, but it would be nice to get some help.
I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, 'Yay! I'm so happy!' It's easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the 'isms' instead, but we can't all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well... it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.
When we filmed the premiere episode of 'United Shades of America,' it was like we were turning over a rock in the woods. The KKK was not part of the national conversation. They were really just a punchline for comedians when you needed to let the audience know something was really, really, really racist.
Whenever I tell people in Berkeley, Calif., where I live, that I'm headed to the beach in Alabama, they are shocked. Most people outside of the Gulf Coast have no idea that Alabama has beaches - even though if you look at a map of Alabama, there is a part of it that looks as if it should belong to Florida.
I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best.
Twelve years ago my mother gets her cataracts removed. So twelve years ago the doctor gives her these enormous sunglasses to wear to protect her eyes from the sun for 4-6 weeks after the operation...twelve years ago. She still wears them. She thinks they're attractive. She looks like Bea Arthur as a welder.
If you're on TV regularly, doing a thing regularly, whether you're Anthony Anderson on 'Black-ish' or Don Lemon, an hour a night, you have to turn into, 'What's the delivery system through which I can deliver information?' I don't mean they are being fake or that they are doing something that's disingenuous.
The idea we have of prison is a scary place that also houses crazy people. And, to me, it was like, none of these guys were scary. They may have done things that are violent or scary, but these are not people that I feel nervous being around, and it feels like to me that we're wasting these men's lives in prison.
I'm not like most comedians. I don't deal with just heckles - I'm also dealing with threats and anger. Here I am, a brown person on stage being quite blunt. I talk about white privilege; I talk about U.S. imperialistic practices; I talk about colonialism. I'm not saying things that are easy for people to laugh at.
I can't imagine what it must be like to be one of the indigenous people of the United States of America. I can't imagine watching the news every day - as people debate whose country this is and who should be in charge of it and how to make it great again - and hardly ever see your people brought into the discussion.
People live in their part of the Union, and if they don't travel a lot, then there is a tendency to believe that the other parts of America couldn't possibly be as American as their part. You can see it in the way people in the South scrunch up their faces when they hear words like 'New York,' 'Chicago,' and 'challah.'
If I say 'political comedian,' then people think you're talking about you, the Senate and Congress, and what's going on in Washington D.C. If I say 'comedian,' people automatically assume that you're a comedian who talks about how his wife won't listen to him and that dummy down at the mechanic who wouldn't fix his car.
I have decided now that my mother should be the GPS woman, don't you think? That would be fantastic: 'Make a left in 11 miles. Get over now - I want you to be prepared. Turn right on Elm Street, I want to see if Myrna Rosenblatt is still alive. Make your second left by the Dairy Queen. Don't go in, they're anti-Semitic.'
I had a phase where I had a mustache. There was several times where I had a mustache. I had a mustache in high school because South Asian men can potentially have a great deal of facial hair. So I had a mustache at 14, and then I grew a proper mustache a few years ago. I just thought it would be fun to just have a mustache.
Who controls the images? Ultimately, we don't control the images. This is the minimum we're allowed to ask for: we don't get to control most of the media. We fight to have some say in the ways we're represented. At the bare minimum, don't insult us in person. That's all we ask! Let us at least be able to function freely in the world.
I always wanted to let people know I was Filipino, but I didn't want to go up on stage and make it so you wouldn't understand my jokes because you're white or black. I always wanted to let people know I was Filipino through my mom. That was always my goal. That way, everyone got it. You don't have to be Filipino to understand my mom.
I have always had a strange relationship to Portland, Oregon. It's a great city. The people who live there love it openly and loudly, and it regularly appears on the lists of best American cities. But something has always felt weird to me about Portland. And not in the way Portlanders mean 'weird' in their slogan 'Keep Portland weird.'
When you're a person of color in white America, you know white people. You know why you know white people? Because you can't enjoy any kind of entertainment if you are not able to humanize white people. If you watch a film and are like, "Oh, this has white people in it? Then I'm not interested," then you can't enjoy anything in America!
People born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens - except for the teeny, tiny, mind-boggling fact that if you live in Puerto Rico, you are not allowed to cast a vote in the election for president. That tiny fact starts to get bigger when you realize that electing our own leaders is the whole reason that we have a country in the first place.
When you see a comedian on stage, the best comedians make it feel like a conversation. But it's not. We have very little interest in what an audience has to say during a performance. Being a stand-up comedian, you're an egomaniac to some degree. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say, apparently. That's not how real relationships work.
Both my parents are immigrants. I've seen different struggles they've had. There's a reason you don't see me using accents. I don't do impressions of my folks. When I'm doing a crappy impression of my folks, and you're laughing, I'm thinking, 'When my parents talk to people, when they walk away do people do impressions of them? Do they laugh?'
When I used to wash my hair with a two-for-one shampoo and conditioner, I would wash it twice, which is completely unnecessary, because that's the point - it's one bottle. Because I used to have the shampoo, that's one, conditioner, one. I did the same thing, even though it was two-in-one. I was corrected in my mid-20s by my girlfriend at the time, who laughed at me and said how stupid that was.
It's a sick thing, right: people are afraid of public speaking. I do public speaking, except my public speaking involves the audience only having one type of emotion and one type of reaction. If they have anything other than laughter, it's a failure. That's an absurd thing for a human to try to seek. The main thing to realize is that whatever I say, it's my truth and I believe in it, and if I don't get a laugh off that, then it's not working.