The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.
How do we in the African American community build a culture in which we are saying to our kids, "Here's what it takes to succeed. Here's the sacrifices you need to make to be able to get ahead. Here's how we support each other. Here's how we look out for each other."
I was not one of those people who wanted to be a comedian when I was growing up. I liked comedy, but didn't know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney. I did do things on the side like improv and sketch comedy, but law was my focus. I was a very bookish, academic kid. When I got out of college, I was really unhappy. I had a great job that I should have loved, yet I was miserable. I slowly realized that was because I wasn't performing. So I just tried stand-up and fell in love with it after one performance.
I think most cartoonists are solitary, lonely kids who use their work as a way to try to connect with the world. If I had any other skills that were more performative - if I could have been a musician or an actor - I'm sure I would have pursued that instead in order to get that instant feedback and to hear applause.
When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.
Part of what we have to do a better job of, if our democracy is to function in a complicated diverse society like this, is to teach our kids enough critical thinking to be able to sort out what is true and what is false, what is contestable and what is incontestable. And we seem to have trouble with that. And our political system doesn't help.
Ever since I started acting, I've always spoken to our people about identity. I've spoken to kids, telling them: "Where do I get my strength to push through the barriers to get me where I'm at today? It's my culture and my traditions, you know?
I'm not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, 'All right! Get out of the room.'
I was in a conversation and someone said: "You know, we were talking about the whole issue of transgender and how it has become so accepted now, and somebody said, 'You know the Oprah show, I think has had a big impact.'" I said, I don't think so. We did several transgender [shows], but we didn't do as much for transgender as I did for, say, abused kids or battered women. And they said, "But no, you started the conversation. You started the conversation and the conversation has led us to here."
I'd like to have a kid, and I'd like to be driving around. I know a kid is going to be a big part of my life. I can trust my kid. I know my kid would be in the backseat of my car, and when I say You wanna get some ice-cream? he's going to be happy. My brother has kids. I see that trick work, the ice cream trick.
Near my house in Los Angeles is a waterfall. I love to take the wife and kids, but it's also near a sketchy neighborhood. So there's a lot of gang members that hang out at the waterfall. It's like somebody took an Ansel Adams photo and then put a Cypress Hill video inside it.
The difference when you have kids comes up when someone wants to meet you out after 9:30 at night. You consider that giant sacrifice. You're like, "Do I do this? Do I stay out until 10:30 and be angry, all of tomorrow?