It's hard to move on when you can see too many good possibilities or any kind of possibility really. That's something that always kind of slows me down and can be a bad place to be in.
I'm not into looking crisp. That's not how I dress or who I am.
We're all just memories of our future selves.
I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.
I guess I'm interested in people and society and what we do collectively in the realm of decisions that shape our world. You know, at least on a human level.
Religions are the training wheels of self enlightenment. They can be helpful in the beginning but at some point they must be let go.
I'm always trying to see things from different peoples' perspectives, to understand why they love something.
I like sincerely talking about market analysis and how marketing is ahead of design and design needs to catch up to fulfill the promise of the marketing.
The stuff that I'm saying, they're not really traditional, structured jokes. It's not like I'm talking about growing up in Chicago or anything remotely close to that. It's basically me juggling words and concepts and phrases and being stupid.
If I can learn a couple of phrases in Italian but do mostly weird, absurd music things, people will like it.
It's creating things that make enough money to create resources to generate new technologies to have those technologies to generate more resources so I can make more things happen.
Performers always come back from the Edinburgh festival with adventure stories. Watts told a few: meeting a young kilt maker who spent a year in a madhouse after eating too much LSD, and accompanying Seattle actor and musician Michael McQuilken (of Collaborator Productions) to the hospital after a Frisbee accident. He reached up to catch it and cut his hand on a sign, .. He had to get a few stitches, but I think he can still play.
Common knowledge, but important nonetheless
Im pretty lazy when it comes to creativity. I just want it to be easy and fun.
In the absence of truth there is confusion, the essence of truth.
I wear the same pants, same shirt and same shoes every day. I learned it from the greats, like Einstein. It's a uniform essentially.
Good comedians are great philosophers.
Technology is a wonderful tool, but also if used incorrectly a horrible tool. We're fascinated by all aspects of it, whatever makes our human lives easier on the planet, but eventually there will have to be some sort of merger. The fascination isn't going to die down.
The biggest fear that I have is settling into too many set behavior patterns, where I feel like I'm no longer exploring possibilities anymore.
One of my favorite things is acting like a speaker or a professor or a CEO of a company and addressing the audience like a group of engineers or designers or marketers.
If it's physical pain, you just deal with it the best way you can. But if it's more emotional, I don't know. I just try my best to feel it, take it in, and just allow myself to go through whatever may actually come from it. And then a certain amount of it, you can use to transform it through art, which is the healthy way of dealing with it, as well.
The most important thing is to keep creating and following my inklings as they come into being and acting on them.
As a child I was very into gadgets and machines and robots.
Being faced with too many options. I mean, it makes me feel as though I'm overwhelmed by too many possibilities; that can be a very vulnerable feeling because it's hard to make a decision.
When you're improvising, you're relying on this connection to creativity.
When in doubt, zoom out.
My mom was a pretty hard worker. She worked her ass off, but I'd say we were middle class. I had a car in high school, so I loved the idea that I could mimic this lifestyle.
Essentially a joke is creating an idea, whether sonic or visual, whether it's something musical or a traditional joke.
I think the end goal, hopefully, is to take advantage of the attention Ive gotten along the way and use it for good and build some communities, and as I get older I can continue to do things and be surrounded by things that are inspirational to me.
I had a job at a movie theater for like a year and a half and then a job at a health food store for like two years. Those were the only two jobs I ever had.
I love the whole futuristic landscape of dark, rainy neon, the mix of Eastern and Western cultures and the beautiful shots of the flying cars.
Whether you're with a group of people, whether you're playing music or whether you're by yourself, even if it's written material, you have to be listening.
I guess, in a way, I grew up mixed race: half white, half black. That question's always been on my mind: 'What are you? Are you this or that? Are you a white dude or are you a black dude?' In a strange way, music and comedy is kind of the same thing. I'm both.They're just different modes of expression.
I've always wanted to do a Shakespearean soliloquy, or a fake Shakespearean soliloquy, and now I'm doing that more often in shows. Things I've always wanted to do starting to happen.
I try not to talk about something unless it's something I love. But if it's something that really annoys me, I fixate on it, learn something about it and then, when I'm onstage, it comes out.
Whether I go to English-speaking countries or non-English-speaking countries I can just modulate to what works for them.
Not necessarily in the beginning, thinking I would have a career in comedy, but I was always interested in making people laugh.
I always did music, but music is an easier thing for me. Making videos and doing comedy things was more of a challenge, so I was more interested in that. Music is a little bit more automatic.
When I'm performing, I hope my research and my experience with those things I'm talking about rings true.
There are three different modes: playing piano, just me at the microphone, and me at my effects units. And I can mix those up in different ways.
The idea of experimenting with machines to create art was always something I tinkered with.
I usually just say I'm a stand-up comedian, but I use looping machines to create ideas with my voice.
Obviously, there's all sorts of life happening all around us, but on a human level, I'm just interested in people making informed decisions. You know, increasing their awareness. And also, trying to encourage people to be more fascinated with information and science and knowledge of all sorts, instead of, you know, it's a generalization, but the encouragement by society, the reflections that society gives us, which is media, television, art - anything, really.
Feel not as though it is a sphere we live on. Rather, an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin.
Just remember, everything you are is.
I've been taking pictures of wherever I go, or on planes, whatever.
Everyone speaks stupid.
If you pay attention to the world, it’s an amazing place. If you don’t, it’s whatever you think it is.
Music and art is regarded as extra and can be the first thing that you cut in a school program, and it's completely not true. If you want to create really boring, frustrated human beings, then yeah, cut out art and science.
I want to be able to make a movie.
Whatever encourages people to become more interested in who they are and discovering who they are, as opposed to just accepting what people or things are saying what they are. That's fascinating to me.
When you look at a photo twenty years from now, if you look at a photo of a moment in your life, or some friends, or yourself, you just have a lot more information about what that memory was. That's exciting to me. It's like a form of time preservation, I suppose.
The things that are reflected back at us, often times, are appealing to a base instinct that's about response as opposed to reflection. So for me, it's important to turn on a piece of information that might interest people, you know, that might interest them in pursuing or researching maybe, or even just thinking about it in that moment as I'm performing it.
I like that feeling of discombobulation that comes in creating an absurd world that doesn't make sense.
I was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music.
I always composed music as a little kid.
You can either just have fun with the joke or you can have fun with the joke and think about the implication of it. It's totally up to the listener.
What I'm doing on stage now is just the tip of the iceberg.
A lot of times, in music especially, it's producers making a political decision.
I have that language and that set of skills to step out of the way and make music the priority.
I don't have a 10-octave range. No human being has a 10-octave range.
Ultimately I want to be able to create whatever I want whenever I want. And if that doesn't work, I don't mind just doing weird plays.
I would always write lyrics and songs on the piano.
Religion can only dream to do what science and art does every day.
I think it's important as a performer, no matter where I travel, if I run into someone at the airport or I'm having a conversation on an airplane, run into someone on the sidewalk, or you're waiting on a long line and you start talking to somebody, who doesn't really share a lot of your same views, but then you come to commonality, I think that's very very important as well.
In general, I'm in support of promoting art and science in public schools. I think music and science are probably the most important factors for the human brain developing. Even more so than any other fields, because music covers mathematics, cognitive reasoning, motor skills, coordination, like, it's kind of everything.
An improv artist's best instrument is their ability keep their antennae clean so they're able to receive what I call the connection to creativity. It's the thing that you see in any amazing moment that any human being is performing. Whether it's watching Michael Jordan navigating through all these attackers and then suddenly rising up and putting the ball in the most amazing way, or watching an actor on stage playing Shakespeare, but not thinking about the actor anymore or the stage or you or the chair, any of these kinds of moments of transcendence.
I'm just kind of interested in focusing on what I'm interested in and just kind of solidifying it, or at least experimenting, or actualizing some of the experiments that I've had in my head for years, either filmicly or with audio.
Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from.
I like to ride the line between absurd and sincere.
There are things I believe in to a certain extent, as much as a scientist would. And I like, through the means of entertainment, to explore those ideas.
Science gives you an understanding of the physical world, and it increases the capacity for fascination.
As long as I have a good time, the audience usually has a good time.
I just think that life is a constant experiment.
In the past, I was definitely more apt to storing pain away and not worrying about it. But as I get older, it's really about figuring out how to process it, how to feel it, and then also how to use it in my art.
If I'm improvising and I'm not doing well it's because I'm not listening very well. Either I'm overly concerned with something or I'm drifting or maybe I'm too stoned but I'm not getting a clear signal.
When I'm at the piano, and I'm improvising some song about something, it usually oscillates between factual, absurd, and sincere.
