A lot of my humor centers on the act of telling jokes and I think this can prevent certain audiences from suspending their feeling of disbelief. It might piss a few people off but I can't help it.

I think it's because it's so different and it takes risks. Plus it's really smart humor. It gives the audience credit in terms of not needing to tell them when to laugh. I love that about the show. There's no laugh track.

Bathroom humor fart and poo poo humor in movies gets a laugh. It's a pretty easy audience and that's been around for ages.

Since the goal of my programs is to show audiences how humor can both help them heal as well as deal with not-so-funny stuff I decided to discuss the events of the previous week the pain all of us were feeling and how humor and some laughter might be beneficial.

Whether it's viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books I'm consistently impressed with their wit humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the 'Delete' option and restraining orders were invented.

You learn timing on the road. You learn structure and how to read an audience. You learn so much about the business of laughter that you can't learn on a set because it's all on you. Sometimes you bomb and you know not to tell that joke again... You just hope people find the humor in the awkwardness.

I hope that just what I sing about and how I relate to my audience is as much of a political statement as I need to make.

I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then y'know that's great. But I hope it involves an audience.

No matter how dark things may get in a story I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.

Confronting a stadium audience you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and of course you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.