Growing up in the Midwest, Boston, and Alabama, I didn't know any Puerto Ricans... at least, I didn't know if I knew any Puerto Ricans. The only Puerto Rican that I had ever even heard of was Juan Epstein, one of the students from the classic 1970s sitcom 'Welcome Back, Kotter.'

As a black man, I actually had naturally sort of comedic curiosity about the Klan.

You don't get smarter by not learning stuff.

The Olympics are great, but they only truly mean something when the moments that come out of them are bigger than the individual sports.

Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.

I'm not interested in being the damsel in distress; I want someone who has her own storyline and her own mission - not a woman who, to use a comedy term, is just there to provide the feed line to someone else's joke.

The comedy in 'Star Trek' is always very subtle, if it's there at all.

I was imagining films in my head and trying to gather friends together to make movies since I was a kid. I tried to do comedy skits and a horror film.