When I was a kid, I used to make skateboarding videos, and I would pretend to be in a band and make rock videos that I'd edit with two VCRs.
I just made random videos with my mom's camera, before YouTube even started. It was just my family and friends in a few spoofs of scary movies and mock talk shows. And then I found out about YouTube so I posted a ton of those videos on there.
My friend Phil Morrison directed a lot of my favorite videos back in the mid- to late-90s - all the Yo La Tengo videos that were funny, a Juliana Hatfield video. He was such an influence with me, and I wanted to do a video the way Phil used to do videos. I did that for Phil.
I was doing YouTube before YouTube was a thing. I was making videos on my camcorder for my friends. I would do parodies of Britney Spears videos and stuff like that.
I'm perfectly happy for my videos to be on YouTube, whether I'm getting paid for them or not. If they're on YouTube, people will see them. If for some reason my videos get taken down from YouTube, well, I apologize. If it was up to me they'd all be up there and they'd all be free.
When we were first approached with the idea to do videos, we said why not. We used the things that we do in our lives in the videos.
Well, I have to say, I used to spend a lot of time looking at cat videos on the internet. It's like YouTube have sent me an e-mail asking if I'm alright because I haven't been on in ages.
For me, it's always fun to have people that do the same thing as you or and have the same work ethic as you. A lot of my friends have YouTube channels, and I use them in my videos, and I'm in their videos.
A Red camera is the best. When I started shooting videos, I had to pay ten thousand dollars just to rent one. I was like, 'I do all these music videos, and I still don't own a Red camera?' So I spent about a hundred thousand dollars to buy one. My own bread. Boom!
I love to watch videos, and I've always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.
You used to have to beg and be the busboy to do standup. I got on Community because people saw my videos on YouTube, which were free.
The videos I put on YouTube have expanded my audience beyond what I could have done at just a Hamburger Mary's. People saw the videos, started booking me, and literally 40-plus countries and thousands of gigs later I can basically say that YouTube has bought me a house.
I have parents coming to the live show saying that they watch my videos with their kids. I have teachers saying they have used the videos with their students.
We do really, really well for content creation and anybody who likes to run videos or edit videos and high performance games.
I love hip-hop videos. It was not meant as disrespect. I used to watch those videos and think, "Are these guys kidding? They've got to be kidding!" But they're not and that in itself is what makes them good.
Although I use myself in my videos, I really see myself as a character. When I look at myself, when I sit and edit, I never think, "That's me." I think, "This is a character, and how do I edit this to tell a story?"