Anthony Jeselnik

“On Twitter, when someone would die, I would write a joke. Or if there's a tragedy, I would write a joke and tweet it. That was my thing, and then at a certain point, people started demanding it.”

“I never knew if I would get my own show, but I knew I loved stand-up.”

“I would write 100 jokes a day. Most of them were terrible. But I just said, 'I'll write more than everybody else, and that's how I'll get better.'”

“I feel like every first episode of a TV show is bad, you know, and it always improves.”

“Every comic went through their Mitch Hedberg phase - the glasses, the hair in the face - and you knew immediately when they were doing it.”

“Everyone has the same kind of fears; everyone has the same big problems in the world, which is, like, fear of death and 'I hope horrible things don't happen to my family,' but they do. And I think people laugh at them as this great release.”

“The driving force behind doing everything that I've been doing for 11 years as a stand-up is having problems with authority and not liking to be told what to do.”

“I don't think people shouldn't try to be edgy, but you have to take what the audience says to you in consideration.”

“I'm not the voice of reason; I'm more the guy using these offensive topics as fodder to raise tension in a joke.”

“I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.”

“I'm not just offensive, I'm very smart about the way that I do it, and that takes a lot of time. People say that young comics shouldn't be trying these things. That's ridiculous. You should try everything and see what sticks.”

“I like seeing what the comedian thinks is funny, not just what they think I'll think is funny.”

“I loved Stephen Wright, and I loved Mitch Hedberg, but they seemed like geniuses you could never emulate. You'd just be ripping them off.”

“That's the worst way you can hear about comedy material: from a third person's blog story that they wrote when they were upset.”

“I had written for Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman in the past. Jimmy had a different voice, and different priorities. He couldn't be the bad guy in the joke; he couldn't upset people, really.”

“I enjoyed writing for someone else's voice, but I wasn't very good at it.”

“In the second grade, I would just get bored and a joke would pop into my head and I would have to say it. It was almost like I had some brilliant novel in my head that I had to get down, and I would interrupt class all the time and get in trouble.”