As a game-show host, what I’m thinking and what I’m experiencing doesn’t matter. My opinion doesn’t matter. So there’s a flattened reality to it. It’s fun to do. But it’s certainly not myself in totality – or even maybe a little bit.
Part of what’s exciting to me about my career is the constant looking forward. Whenever I finish one project, I am looking to what’s next.
My fear is if I expose myself, not so much that I’ll be hurt, but that the reaction will be “Is that all there is? Is that the entirety of you? Because it’s boring.”
I imagine there’s a level of narcissism that goes into thinking you’re enough.
There’s things I know I’m good at, and those things interest me less and less. I learn a lot more from doing it wrong than I do from doing it right.
My process is surprisingly straightforward. I find myself with little to do over a stretch of time and I say, “I should write children’s books today.” Then I sit down and write a children’s book, and if it takes more than, realistically, three hours, I feel like I’ve done something wrong.
If I revise a children’s book, if I’m spending three hours on the first draft, I’m probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That’s hard work.
Kids love to be silly, they love to laugh, so I think it was natural for my kids to like the sort of books that I write – and it’s the only kinds of books I’m capable of writing.
You can’t write a children’s book that takes more than five or six minutes to read, because it will drive the parents batty. It has to be compact. Nobody thinks about the parents when they write these stupid books. I could write longer children’s books, but it would actually be bad if I did.
Hosting a show, even a talk show or a game show, there’s so much business you have to conduct. There’s so much guiding you have to do.
If you say “I’m going to be an actor, but I’ll get a teaching degree just in case,” when things get hard, you’ll just be a teacher and that’s how you get stuck.
All my friends were girls. Then my mom’s strident feminism for years where men were thought of as the enemy, I just didn’t know what the right way to be a man was.
I was very surprised how many people were earnestly reminiscing about the ’80s. It’s such a stupid thing to do, like, to be honestly invested in nostalgia. It never even occurred to me to do that.
It’s such a deliberate thing to sit down and write a tweet. You’re putting yourself out there in a very deliberate way, and over however many tweets, you start to create a character for yourself.
Twitter is about creating whatever persona you want to create and either sticking with it or changing it or evolving it or contradicting it, and I’ve done all that stuff.
With stand-up, you can be as freeform as you want to be. You can say what you want, how you want, at any moment without constraint.
You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there’s a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.
I think in doing stand-up there are no rules and there’s no architecture.
By the end of the time I’m writing a book, I’m tearing my hair out and I want to go do stand-up. And then I want to do something else. I don’t know why it is true with me that I can’t just be satisfied doing the one thing, but I’m constantly flitting from one thing to another.
The characters that I have on Twitter have very little resemblance to me, the person who’s writing them.