The first thing that I learned - and I understood it at a really young age - was that I could get a laugh. Really early. Because my mother and father are funny.
I've seen many female comics that a lot of people haven't heard of who are so funny, and I saw them come up, and they were working so hard, and then all of a sudden they had a baby, and they just got tied up in motherhood, and eventually, they kind of just stopped doing stand-up, and I thought it was such a shame.
I mean, I - it's so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I've been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.
I wake up every day and look at my own ugly mug in the mirror and don't think twice about it. The fact that other people might want to look at me still feels funny. It's flattering, but funny.
You look at 'Survivor's Remorse.' Or 'Blackish.' Or Issa Rae's brilliant, funny 'Insecure,' which started out on YouTube but is now on HBO. And you see multifaceted representations of the African-American experience. It's insanely exciting.
Before, I guess, mum and dad were everything, but now, in my case, I had two new girls and all of a sudden they're completely dependent on you and there's a third generation. It's a funny shift all of a sudden. You have the babies, you have yourself and then you have your parents.
There's something that's really fun about the challenge of making the mundane funny, too, I think.
I am odd-looking. I sometimes think I look like a funny Muppet.
I'm odd looking. Sometimes I think I look like a funny muppet.
These people that watch our MTV shows, they're not music fans. They're people that are lazy on their couch and want to watch funny videos or whatever.
No matter what I do, I can't help but feel that I'm under a microscope. Some of it is completely silly, and some of it is meant to be hurtful. For example, a website accumulated all of my music videos to point out perceived Illuminati images. I loved that one. Of course, it was all ridiculous but funny.
To me, the musical is best when it's a musical comedy. So if you have a very, very funny show, and very good, funny songs, that's what the musical does best.
I don't have a desire to do reality. Because my truth is not what people are responding to. My truth is funny; I laugh with my husband every day.
The funny thing is I'm not even Latin. I was constantly getting Latin roles, and I was like, I even was nominated for an award, and I was like, 'Let them know at the NAACP, the first white woman. Let them know I'm totally grateful, but I'm not Latin. I can't do that. I play Latin.'
Anybody can make jokes. But unless they come from conviction, and there's truth in them, you haven't nailed it. They aren't as funny as they could be, and they don't make a point.
I auditioned for a movie recently, and when I went in, the producer said he'd told one of its stars, Naomi Watts, that he was auditioning me, and she'd said, 'She's so funny; she's a great actress - you should hire her.' What a lovely, kind, and supportive thing to do for another woman.
Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
I don't see a lot of narratives written where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They're very seldom written.
Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.
It's just my natural way - to be funny. I don't know why that is. But as I've said, humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting, too.
