I got an email from Nick [Kroll] that he and John [Mulaney] were looking to put on the stage show with two of their characters from Kroll Show and could I help at all. And they were doing it [off-Broadway] at the Cherry Lane and they had been performing it at UCB, just sort of testing it out. I worked on it for a little bit downtown and it was a great experience.
When I got divorced, the first people I called were Nick Kroll and John Mulaney and T. J. Miller - all the pals.
I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.
Hopefully people are upset for the reason I want them to be upset. Even when I was doing open mics, I've always had people upset. I've never been the consummate crowd-pleaser.
I didn't go through the routine of singing in small clubs and doing open mics and working so hard the way a lot of people do and did. It was just an overnight kind of thing.
Steve Rannazzisi, Nick Kroll, Paul Scheer, Jon Lajoie - and they're such funny guys that they bring their own sort of twist to it all.
When I started, I was very deliberate about making friends with people like John Mulaney who were really funny and wanted to go up and do as many open mics as I did.
I didn't grow up during the time that Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis and all those people were playing. So it's not really my responsibility to keep it up, what they were doing.
Our goal is to tell people about the International Space Station. I think very rarely people look up 250 miles and think, What are those guys working on, what are those men and women doing at this moment... They're living and doing regular things, but also doing incredible work as well. We really want to bring that to people.
I have tattooed on my hand the silver throwback mics from back in the day. My father used to have one of those when he'd lead people at the YMCA doing the cha-cha slide.
I don't like karaoke because the mics are always so worn out. The quality of the mics is such that you're always going (screaming) "Yeah, yeah!" and then you can't like it. It's like sometimes I'm too professional to get up and do it.
I was always just like, 'Standups are making it up.' A lot of people have that myth about standup. And so it wasn't until I was in college for theater school in Boston that I realized I can actually start going to open mics and figuring this out.
Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day always says we were influences on him, because he does melodic but distorted, like what we were doing. The Ramones were doing it. We were doing it. The Buzzcocks, all those bands.
Nick, space. Now. (Acheron) Go, Nick, fetch. Here, boy, here. You should let me borrow one of those leather collars you wear and give me a tag with Kyrian’s number on it. ‘In case of loss, call my owner.’ (Nick)
As a child, I always wanted to come to the Premier League, so when I made the move, I was very happy. Chelsea were on the up - they were doing really good - so I was very excited, and in the end, everything went well here for me.
I grew up in the spoken-word community. Before everybody had a home studio, or before we could get booked for shows, open mics were the only way to be heard by other people. It really gave me a chance to develop as a performer. Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.