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.

I think the first rule of comedy is that it has to be funny and I find a lot of the broad comedy which is sent to me, painfully unfunny.

I do mostly comedy, and it tends to be a subtler comedy. But I think that probably lends itself well to commercials.

Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'

It's important on a comedy to have a fun loving set.