When I was growing up, we dressed up for church.

Growing up in an Italian family, we used our body to convey a message.

People come to a show, then they go back to their neighborhood, and it has become like word-of-mouth. Everybody loves to turn somebody on to something. It kind of just snowballed.

I like Las Vegas because it kind of gives me a chance to gauge my material in front of a very diverse group of people. There are a lot of different people in the audience, and you can kind of get a barometer for how your material plays throughout the country.

In college, my teachers were usually after me for going after comedy too much, leaning too much in that direction.

Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.

The running joke about the Premio Cervantes, the most coveted literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, which was established by Spain's Ministry of Culture in 1976, is that Cervantes himself wouldn't have received it. This is because he was, in his heart, the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers.

I think I always wanna write comedy because that's what feels truest to me; it feels closest to life as I know it, so that's what I want to reproduce.