"Capitalism doesn't care about sentimentality."
"The Right doesn't usually threaten to leave the country. When the Right feels threatened, it just declares it is going to invent a time machine to take the country back so that America can be 'great again.'"
"To be off the grid is to be disconnected from most of America's infrastructure without having to cross any border."
"In most major cities, you can find stores for urban homesteaders. They sell everything you need so that you won't need anything. Sort of a 'Take This Civilization and Shove It' starter kit."
"Usually, the news out of Florida makes me feel like being black in Florida can be a terminal condition."
"No state income tax, no snow, lots of golf courses, and ready-made gated communities make Florida an irresistible place for seniors - the ones who have the income level - to retire."
"At worst, spring break in Daytona Beach feels feral - like everybody is trying to re-create scenes from the movie 'The Hangover.'"
"We really suffer from a hot-take disease, wanting to be the first one who has the hottest take."
"If we're constantly giving every one of our allies the woke test instead of inviting them to be more woke, we're doomed. You can be the most woke person of all time and be alone."
"The big thing I learned from Chris Rock was not to be a victim of show business. Don't let show business push you around."
"I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He's had many lives. My dad's a capitalist to his bone, but he's also a human to his bone."
"I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live."
"If you say, 'I don't care if Muhammad Ali was a Muslim or not; he was just great,' what you're really saying is, 'I don't care about Muhammad Ali.' Same with Prince being black."
"I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best."
"I never wanted to be in the late-night talk show wars, and I think somehow with 'Totally Biased,' I got caught up in all that. Suddenly, there are articles about how we finally have a black voice in late-night."
"There were definitely a few ways I could have gone after 'Totally Biased' ended. One of those was getting a job at Starbucks."
"We can't throw the worst part of racism into the dustbin of history."
"There's a lot of power in laughter."
"Over the years, I'd hear Jon Stewart disavow being a journalist and say, 'No, I'm a comedian.' I'd be like, 'Stop pretending. You know you're a journalist.'"
"Most people have the ability to turn their empathy engine back on, but there's such a seductive burn to not being empathetic."
"I keep trying to write the crowd-pleasing slavery joke and the crowd-pleasing reparations joke, but any time you mention slavery or reparations in any detail, it seems to bum lots of people out. That's a challenge I keep putting in front of myself."
"I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, 'Yay! I'm so happy!' It's easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the 'isms' instead, but we can't all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well... it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce."
"When I was starting out, I was just bringing a garbage bag of jokes onstage, pulling them out like, 'What about this? No? Alright.' I was just trying to be funny about anything."
"The jokes I was always attracted to, and that I would tell for the longest, were jokes where I cared about the subject. Whenever I wrote a joke where I didn't care, even if it was really funny, the third time I told it, it would lose steam."
"When 'Totally Biased' was canceled, I thought my career was over - but apparently it wasn't."
