You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.
On 'Adam Ruins Everything' we do the broadest sketch comedy possible. We do stuff where you can see it immediately and know it's a joke - characters in big silly costumes; here's Uncle Sam and he's twiddling his fingers saying, 'Oh, I'm naughty.'
I think that at the end of the day correcting misinformation and questioning what we think we know as a habit of mind is incredibly important.
No one who hired Siegfried & Roy was shocked when they brought a tiger onstage. So you shouldn't be shocked if you book a comedian and she points out that the emperor has no clothes.
I want to do stories that are about the bits of cultural furniture that are sitting there that we're like, 'Oh yeah, that's been there for years! What could possibly be weird about it?' And then we're going to lift that piece of furniture and look at all the bugs scurry away.
There is nothing better than getting to just dig in and seriously play a video game for a six-hour flight from New York to L.A.
Comics are regularly asked to perform for impossible rooms. They're called 'hell gigs.'
I find that a really restful, relaxing way to spend time on a plane is to listen to an audiobook while drawing.
The idea that you must bathe every day is, to a certain extent, a manufacture on the part of the soap industry.
I wanted to go to grad school in philosophy... Nobody was like, 'You should!' You know, they were all like, 'you could?'
We don't claim to be infallible. I don't claim to be giving you truths from on high.
Human capacity for not thinking about what we're doing is infinite.
I have a very deep belief that all the problems in society are not because some people are bad and some people are good and we have to get rid of all the wrong people. Everything that we want to fix is because of a flaw in humans in general, something that humans together do incorrectly.
In my moments of greatest hubris, I say to myself, 'Yes, you should be trying to change the world.'
In a live setting, the audience is trapped and can't leave. That really makes the audience be with you and laugh more because you're there.
If it weren't for the fellow union members and leaders who have my back, the barons of the TV industry would happily pay me a nickel a page and spend what would have been my residuals on more caviar to put in their infinity pools.
I sort of expose the truth about common misconceptions, or you know, investigate why we do certain things culturally, why we have certain traditions, and ask the question, 'is this really the best way we can be doing things?'
That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.
Information's right at our fingertips, but so is what you want to believe. It's the classic thing of someone Googling 'autism vaccines' - they'll find what they're looking for, depending on what they think. You'll find lots of people who are just bolstering what they already think, bolstering their cultural attitude.
I don't want to change people's opinions to my political opinion; I want to enlighten people and make them think about the world differently.
