I paid attention to not being a comedian, and just concentrated on being who I was. That is what you have to do. If you say you are a comedian that has been done before. If you just be who you are then you are unique. Everyone is unique.
The thing is, I was never really a comedian - a comedian would scoff at the notion of me as a comedian because I've never done anything, really. I've always just been some guy who's funny.
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.
I've been seesawing between not doing too much racial stuff - because I'd rather be known as the funny comedian than the funny Chinese comedian - but at the same time embracing my voice and who I am and what makes me unique, you know, which is the racial background.
If I was a young man, I might have bypassed the whole comedian-actor thing and just been a filmmaker. Then I'd probably have spent my whole life going, 'I wonder if I could have been a comedian.'
I get very confused about being called a comedian, because when you say 'I'm a comedian,' people expect you to crack a joke. Maybe I use laughter and humour to make people think. I don't know what you call that - a humourist? A satirist? A pessimistic comedian? I don't know. Satirists can be very dark.
It used to be if you wanted to be a comedian, you used to just do sets. You'd go up three times a night, just get better, and then some people would see you and you'd do 'The Tonight Show,' and then boom, you're a comedian.
Being unique seems more desirable than ever. People are exhausted by clichés, by platitudes, by mass-produced realities, by what's been done and done and done. The role of a true artist is to present their own unique vision, and so it has always made sense to me that works of art should be radical.
I think every business, really, has a unique reason for being, unique assets, unique attributes, a unique history. And that can be turned into a very attractive design story, essentially, that consumers can relate to.
If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into being by chance mutations.
I mostly want to highlight things that feel like an injustice, and that's not really political. No one is going to - or should - say that bigotry toward Muslims is partisan. It's a matter of being just or not being just. So that's why I started calling myself a social justice comedian.
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.
Black comics, they only watch Black comedians. You're a comedian; you're not just a Black comedian. You're a comedian. I try to get that through to everybody.
I always wanted to be a comedian, even when I was a little kid. I had a funny father who was in the news business, by the way. He was a radio news guy. So the news was always in my house, and funny was always in my house. It was sort of just baked into the DNA that I would do this for a living, but I can remember being less than 10 years old and dreaming about being a comedian.
I feel like there's no real innovation in having some music. It's more just unique personalities and unique expressions, and you being able to tell your story.
Nintendo has been a very unique company because it's not just hardware but also one of the major software publishers. Because it is in a unique position, it's given us a unique advantage.
I think there is a weird loneliness that comes with being a comedian. There is something definitely inside the personality of a person who wants to be a comedian, and (he or she) is looking to connect (to the audience) at all times.