In my business, you have so many things going at once - TV shows, projects, movies - and sometimes, things never actually come to fruition.
I feel really trapped as a comedian - someone who is supposed to be funny and light, making jokes all the time. But I'm actually in this inauthentic armor.
I wrote a 'Lenny Letter' on a whim, and it felt indulgent, but people came up to me with tears in their eyes saying, 'Thank you.' There's so much shame about mental illness in our country and so many stereotypes about women being 'crazy' or 'psycho.'
We're socially constructed to hide our flaws, and that breeds pain for a lot of people.
Stand-up. It's the only place I'm comfortable.
The indie movie world is like a bad Tinder date, and there are always strings attached.
One of the big conversations I'm trying to have onstage right now is that to be pro-woman, you don't have to be anti-man. Saying all men suck makes you look like an idiot. And it's not helpful.
I have a theory, which is that the idea of a roast is to go to this forbidden, uncomfortable, almost performance-art-level shock place, but because we're so regularly shocked and offended today, the idea of an hour and a half of unbridled negativity is just so unappealing.
Being on the plane is my catch-up time. I write thank-you notes. I read. I write stand-up jokes.
For writing stand-up, I have to have a little bit of anger and frustration to be motivated to do it. Stand-up, for me, comes from kind of a hostile engine.
When a lot of people are distrusting the news they watch, comedians are stepping up talking about things that most people are too afraid to talk about, shining light on problems nobody else will admit, whether it's Samantha Bee or John Oliver or Trevor Noah.
Comedians are obsessed with justice and the truth.
My body is not supportive of my career. My body has other plans for me. My body's plan is to slowly rot from the inside. By the time I'm ready to have kids, it's not going to be viable to do that.
I used to put on spray tan, like, three times a day, and it just looked like there was a terrible accident in my bed at all times... it looked like a crime scene.
Sometimes the funnier you are, the more vulnerable and scared you are underneath it all. So I think, for me, comedy was always a defense. It was a weapon so that you can't hurt me.
In the entertainment industry, there is this fear of getting older, because we have high definition television now, and you can see things that the human eye can't even pick up. But the good thing about standup is that the older you get, the funnier you get.
For me, my body image struggle started very young. All that I heard from my mother, my aunts, and my mom's friends was, 'I gotta lose five pounds.' At 5 years old, I learned a size 2 is not thin enough. It was, 'Don't eat carbs! Don't eat sugar! Drink Diet Coke! You always diet!' So that was engrained in my brain at a very early age.
