I just noticed that audiences didn't want to laugh at me because of the way I looked, so I just went with that. It seemed fun to play a villain on stage and I wanted my jokes to be so good that I could just calmly tell them on stage. I didn't want to show any neediness. It was important to me to be cool up there.

Question: How long did it take you to figure out your persona? Is there a video out there of you early in your career making Gaffigan-esque jokes? Answer: No Gaffigan-esque videos out there, but it took me years to put this persona together. Just endless nights of open mics and trying new things.

Everything I say is mean, so that makes everything less mean. If I’m up there talking about relationships and making fun of milkshakes and then all of a sudden I have a rape joke, it would make it seem that much more awful. If everything is rape and death, then it takes the pressure off of those things. People can feel a little better about laughing at something awful when it’s surrounded by other horrible things.

I guess the most detail I can go into with recounting my life would be, I'm having fun. I believe art is using shock and awe to give you a slice or microcosm of what life is. My albums are what life seems like to me:fair, unfair, whatever. I don't want to be a "rap star". I want people to be me for however long the album is when they listen to it. There are a lot of questions on the EP and Culdesac that you should be asking yourself/I ask myself. But....yeah.

I definitely play up certain parts of my personality and exaggerate vulnerabilities I have for the sake of comedy. I feel like the Nathan on the show has a much tougher time reading social cues and is way less self aware than the real me. He's also much more confident. So yeah, it's different, but at the same time it's not like in my real life I'm strollin' around scorin' babes. It all comes from a real place. A lot of the time I feel like I'm emulating a younger version of myself.

I think it's that Community and Rick and Morty don't punish obsession. I remember Megan Ganz coming to work on Community and she seemed kind of bummed out and told us that her therapist, having listened to all of her frustrations about working on Community, finally said, "but isn't it just a show?" And the reason Ganz was bummed out by that was because she knew right then and there that she now had to go and find another therapist. Nobody that worked on Community or that works on Rick and Morty has the capacity to regard the show as unimportant - people that feel that way quit - and I think you can feel through the screen that if you were to approach someone working on Rick and Morty with a ...[Read more]

The situation certainly is. Half my family growing up were carers of some sort, mostly retirement homes (stroke, Alzheimers), and Derek is like my fictional superhero of an everyday gentle outsider. I suppose they're all little fables about kindness. And possibly, a love letter to my lovely, poor and humble family growing up.

I separate their work completely from their transgressions. Everything about their work is extraordinary. Everything about their transgressions is utterly ordinary.

i think we're all in character, as exaggerated versions of ourselves.

Monuments Men has a great script and a fascinating story that no one has ever heard before. And there are a whole bunch of great actors in the movie. You hate to say that a film is an important film but I think it's a movie that people will say enlightened them about something that was forgotten, and it's a situation that exists around the world now. For example when we invaded Iraq, we weren't really taking care of business and a bunch of criminals went in and looted the museums. It's what's happening in Syria now. It's far worse than stealing gold or diamonds. It's stealing a culture, a mystery, and if those works of art are stolen, we are losing the ability to learn about culture and abou...[Read more]

sure, i think it naturally boxes me in. One fun thing is to always try to working outside of boxes though... and i think people have gotten a little too concerened about things like genres and labels. I'm hoping this record is additive to my body of work and makes me a more interesting person to pay attention to.