John Mulaney

“I like making fun of myself a lot. I like being made fun of, too. I've always enjoyed it. There's just something really, really funny about someone tearing into me.”

“Most open-mic experiences I had were okay.”

“It's important to remember that life is a joke, and that outlook grants a lot of perspective, but I don't think comedy should change and become political due to other things. It should just laugh at that cosmic joke that life is all the time.”

“I never knew you were supposed to push off of your feet when you walked. And I tried it, and I walked much faster.”

“I never turn on the crowd. Sometimes, you think it's a terrible show, and then afterward, sometimes people say they really liked it. So turning on the crowd is only going to alienate the few people who might like it. What do I do in that situation? Get through it.”

“All my money is in a savings account. My dad has explained the stock market to me maybe 75 times. I still don't understand it.”

“My dad is and was very funny and had a really dry sense of humor, which, as a kid, seemed un-fun. But in retrospect, it's kind of hilarious.”

“If something is very, very funny but possibly controversial, if it's truly funny, then it's worth doing. Things aren't worth doing for the sake of being controversial.”

“Going on the road for long stretches can seem daunting, and I certainly miss being home sometimes, but the chance to see so many different cities, let alone perform in them, is something I am really grateful for.”

“Things have to be funny first, and if they want to have a point, that's awesome.”

“My childhood was completely dominated by Bill Clinton and the OJ trial. I don't think we had a family dinner where one didn't come up.”

“If someone had written a review saying, ''Oh, Hello' is stupid,' we would have said, 'Yeah, it is. You're absolutely right.' That people liked it was extremely cool.”

“It's been very funny to try to act like an adult. Even getting dressed. Every day, I'm like, 'Should I wear a blazer and walk around with an umbrella? Do I carry a briefcase?' Because I'm trying to be some image of the adults I saw on TV growing up.”

“I don't make plans anymore. So I'm not living minute to minute.”

“When you have something that you did so many jobs on and were so front and center on, and then people dislike it, you want to learn lessons from it, and you want to move on, and you want to move on too fast.”

“Bill Clinton fascinates me because, at the time, it seemed like his shenanigans and the people after him were the biggest political stories you could ever imagine. I remember when the 'Starr Report' was published in the newspaper, all of us were reading it in the high-school cafeteria, and a dean started taking the newspapers away from us.”

“Sometimes I - with comedy, it's like someone liking you in high school. They either do, or they don't. And when they don't, they don't. And that's it. There are no appeals. You show up, and you're like, 'Hi! I'm -' and you stumble, and they're like, 'It's over.'”

“I like to pace onstage.”

“You can do good work simply staying up all night and eating nothing but junk food, but probably not in the long term.”

“As I got into high school and after puberty, I was a little more inward. I was a real extrovert when I was little, but I don't know, I just got quieter... With my friends, I was still an extrovert.”