Question: How do I get funny?

There is pretty simple advice you can give for stand up. Just write a lot, be comfortable, record your sets, listen to them, pay attention to what works. Do as many sets you can. It’s straightforward. At the basic level, there’s no getting around that stuff. Then a lot of it is luck. Eventually you get put in a position where things fall together and then you can kind of ride that momentum.

My practical advice for a young comic is if you want to do this, do something. Do a lot of it. If you want to build an internet presence, then tweet this amount of times, tweet this many jokes or post this many times. There’s different things like that you can do. Approach it like a job and take it seriously. Also, don’t be an asshole to people, but that doesn’t guarantee success, you know.

Find your people to work with and write with and perform with. Get up in front of people as much as you can, which is really the only way to get better. You just have to be kind of relentless about it. NYC was good in that way for me, it felt easy to run around the city and do that stuff.

Comedy is one of those things where, even if you might not have trained anywhere or taken a class, you can just be naturally funny. In that sense, people can think they’re really good at it without necessarily having done it for years and years. Having a career in comedy is very different from just making people laugh.

If you want to fully do comedy as a career, you can’t just be a funny Twitter person. Whether you’re interested in stand-up or sketch or improv or script writing or writing a book, you have to work as much on that as being funny on Twitter. It’s good for dipping your toe in the water and getting out there, but it’s not the only thing you can do to establish yourself. There are people who are happy to just be funny anonymous Twitter people, and then have their other life. That’s a totally valid choice. It’s just up to you how much you want to delve into comedy.

I’m very aware of when people tell me something is going to be funny and then I watch it, and I feel either snobbish or I feel like I’m alone on an island where I don’t find everything funny that everyone else finds funny. It happens a lot with TV shows. People will say, “You gotta watch this show. It’s hilarious.” I can watch the entire episode and not laugh once. It’s got the comedy font in the title. It’s obviously a comedy….

I don’t know any of the real rules. I just know what I think is funny. I think it usually comes from the taste that I’ve developed over the years, stuff I feel that myself and my friends would find funny, and just instinctually what will make me laugh.

I love when people come up to me after the shows and say they weren’t sure what to do, if they were supposed to laugh or supposed to be moved and that the whole thing was kind of confusing. To me that is the best response you can get because you want the show to be a little bit indefinable, so that is the highest compliment for me.

It’s funny to think of myself as a 19 year-old in crazy elderly man makeup trying to play serious roles in classic plays. I wanted to be a serious actor and I hated it when I got laughs. I was so upset when people would laugh at me. I wanted to be Ian McKellen. I didn’t really trust comedy, which is funny because I think back now and realize that my influences were really people like Carol Burnett and John Waters. That’s what I really loved and now, of course, that’s very much in keeping with what I do.

I would get slots opening for bands, whether it was Tenacious D or Bad Religion, and I would walk off the stage as people were throwing things and booing. People would say, “How can you deal with this? Doesn’t this just destroy your ego?” And it didn’t. It really didn’t, because I was in that same zone that I learned from Flipper. The zone of being like, “I’m putting on the show that I would like to see, and the people that agree with me, and there are a few, they enjoyed it, so I’m happy with it.” You know what I mean? This is what I’d like to watch.

I’ve seen it with stand ups, with writers, where this person is so funny and then they get a job at this show and you kind of never hear from them again because they got comfortable. It’s better to be uncomfortable. But then again the people who were going to do that were going to probably do that anyway. I do see some really funny people that are just on lock: “That person, everything they said was so funny, they have an amazing mind…” And I just want to see all the things they are going to do. And then they go work on Family Guy. [laughs]