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Lets start at the beginning.
This was my first long story joke.
So you go to Trader Joes …[At] 72nd and Broadway.
After a therapy session this guy that many comedians see named Alan Lefkowitz.
He started with Richard Lewis.
I decided to yell, This isnt fair.
My favorite part of the joke is the story of how the cashiers at Trader Joes handle the receipts.
Why that stylistic choice?Well, Ive never been really comfortable talking about my mental illness onstage.
And then there was this opportunity where I was already doing pretty well with this joke.
Like a lot of things about jokes, it was about timing.
Id just read a New YorkTimesop-ed by my psychiatrist.
Hes a professor at Cornell and he sees patients.
All these things, I tried them out one night and they worked and they stuck.
Instead of making me embarrassed, it was very freeing.
Its calledThe Great Depresh,and were shooting it for HBO in June here in New York.
I think he was very vulnerable.
I nearly asked you about your state abbreviations joke.
It gets talked about a lot because it felt like the height of your ability as a comedian.
Its a cheat, because up until recently I didnt want to tell you anything about me.
I wanted to keep it to myself.
The last Colbert show I did, I talked about all these lazy things in my life.
What I really was saying, but I didnt have the confidence, was,Im so sick.
Im very sad and I cant function.
On Twitter, you write a series of tips for aspiring comics.
To me, it sounded like when you heard craftsman, you heard not an artist.
But recently you tweeted this:
39)This weekend, spend two hours in an art museum.
Notice how meticulous and precise the artists are with their paintings/sculptures.
Consider the countless choices they made.
I can remember the inspiration.
There was this painting by Edward Hopper.
I said,He thought about that splotch of white paint a lot.
There are a lot of other areas on this painting that he made choices on.
I feel very creative right now, and my output has been stronger than its ever been.
That may have been the case, but I felt I was just writing joke to joke.
Now I feel I have, for lack of a better term, a formula.
