In a time of tight budgets difficult choices have to be made. We must make sure our very limited resources are spent on priorities. I believe we should have no higher priority than investing in our children's classrooms and in their future.

If you want a future of shared prosperity where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining where the American Dream is alive and well and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world you should vote for Barack Obama.

Upper classes are a nation's past the middle class is its future.

And regardless of the fact that in this country certainly in the arts we treat comedy as a second-class citizen I've never thought of it that way. I've always thought it to be important. The last time I looked the Greeks were holding up two masks. I've always thought of it not only as having equal value but as the craft of it being funny.

For a Catholic kid in parochial school the only way to survive the beatings - by classmates not the nuns - was to be the funny guy.

I actually was class clown but I don't know how that happened because I've never been considered an outwardly funny person.

I actually was class clown but I don't know how that happened because I've never been considered an outwardly funny person-as the people in this room will attest.

I didn't plan to be the rude middle-class comedian. You write a certain type of joke that you find funny and mine happen to be often rude. Yes it's juvenile but that's me.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally my body was changing my mind was changing and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

I was so afraid to even read a paper in front of my classmates. It is very funny because at that point my teachers would never have believed that I could speak in front of an audience of over 2 000 people.