What teenagers are ready to laugh at is the misery of other people.
[ When I met Barack Obama] He says, I do a pretty good me myself - he said something like that. But he's - he is a close talker. He's a touchy guy.
As kids, there's somehow the fear that these bullies can end your life if they want to. Everything is blown up, and occasionally that kind of awful thing does happen.
You can track elections by who was playing that president on 'SNL' at that time. There's the theory that the more likable or charismatic impression would help get the president elected.
Obama was the best thing for black nerds everywhere. Finally we had a role model. Before Obama, we basically had Urkel.
A part of being black in America and, you know, I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that we're being too aware of race somehow, we're obsessed with it or we're seeing racism where there just isn't racism.
I don't think that humans are, in our nature, we're evil or anything like that. But I do think there's a demon in our DNA, in our tribal subconscious that affects the way we work and we operate as a group.
The audience's imagination will do a better, more personalized version of the horror than you can actually paint. So that just, you know, with something like "The Blair Witch Project," which is, you know, whatever, it's 89 minutes of people running through the woods and one minute of, you know, a guy standing in a corner.
I love dipping into worlds at a fast and furious pace. A little glimpse allows the audience to put together the rest of that world in their brain. I love sketches that require the audience to piece together the comedic engine themselves. Give them all the information but not tell them what the scene is about so they can have that eureka moment of, "Oh my God, he's only used to the way urban students pronounce their names. That's what's going on here.".
Nobody wants to see sketch comedy that's the same sketch they've seen time and time again, or that's just a rehash of that thing.
With a horror movie, you want to know where the engine of the fear is coming from. Like in comedy, you want to know what the engine that's going to make the comedy - where that's coming from.
Back when we were Neanderthals or whatever, we evolved to think along tribal lines. Survival was based on this idea of who are we and who are the others who will come and take our resources. I think it's an animal and a human thing that we all see in terms of us vs. them, and race is a very easy way to separate who is us and who is them.
We haven't done enough work to encourage minorities to strive to make movies. Hollywood is a place full of white male directors - there are many good ones. We just haven't nurtured our voices.
Racism is within each and every one of us.
It's very uncomfortable to talk about race. It often devolves before it begins.
I've always thought of myself as an African-American comedian, African-American man, everything.
Everybody knows this legend in kind of African-American lore. There's always somebody in your neighborhood named Orangejello or Lemonjello. And that's spelled - Orangejello is spelled O-R-A-N-G-E-J-E-L-L-O.
[Barack Obama] will touch you on the shoulder and, you know - in that big brother or father figure kind of way. And you really do feel sort of shepherded by him.
I think that is also something he [Barack Obama], in the beginning of his presidency, he couldn't really explore and couldn't show. He had to be almost a one-dimensional, stoic leader during that first election.
Since we were renamed, and now it feels like 80 percent of the African-American population has the name Washington or Jefferson or some president or slave owner's name. And, I almost wonder is this, like, is this part of a way of taking back the principle of naming your - I might be going too far into this - but naming your kids something of your choice?
The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. You know, I speak like my mom; I speak like, you know, like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.
You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room.
It's a no-win situation with politics, it's always going to be stressful. I'm more into the comedy of life.
Anyone who's really utilized collaboration has a philosophy like, 'Let's throw it all against the wall and see what sticks.' That's how we do it. At a certain point, we're cutting scripts that we love.
Any time I claimed to be white, that would be unacceptable. It just doesn't make sense in people's minds. If I'm white, how can I walk through a department store and still have people scared that I'm going to rob them? Which, that can still happen.
