The way we get our news is very important, and the idea that the media doesn't always do right by us, and that they focus on things they shouldn't for ratings, is very important, and it's absolutely worthy of ridicule.

I do think I'm terrific at giving advice. Although in our hearts we usually know what we should do. It's rare that you get in a situation in life where you don't know how to proceed. You know the thing you should do, but don't want to.

Being in Los Angeles, I've had access to some of the best improvisers around and I really study them and what they do. It really it just about listening and what you can add to it.

The thing you have to be on guard against, more than anything, is self-sabotage. You have to make sure you're not your own worst enemy.

I have a friend who only buttons the bottom button of his suit jacket, which you're not supposed to do. 'Supposed to do.' But it's his thing, and it's his personal style, and it's like you've got to honor that. People can do whatever they want.

As much as I love live performance and as much fun as it can be to travel around, it really is nice to be able to stay at home and make a living and pay the mortgage and spend time with my wife.

Politics is a thing that is kind of the same over and over and over again. But we have to find new ways of poking fun at it and letting the air out of people and satirizing things that are worthy of satire.

When Huell Howser died, James Adomian had done Huell Howser for years. As crazy as that impression was, James genuinely loved Huell Howser.

More than just a sobering history lesson, 'Angry Birds' is a beautiful game. It's absolutely lovely.

People are going to hire you, or they're not, and there's only so much you can do to hedge your bets.

If you pay attention, stand-up can be great improv training ground. But one of the things that helped me the most was doing warm-up for the 'Mr. Show' tapings way back when.

I don't find monkeys inherently funny.

Look, we have long known that birds and pigs are mortal enemies. That's just the way of the world. Birds hate pigs.

From a personal standpoint I really like that Bernie Sanders is making so much noise.

What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There's very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.

It's important for us all to elect people not just on blind party loyalty. We've got to really examine what candidates say and do.

Nobody held a gun to my head and forced me to write recaps about the tenth season of 'American Idol.' Although I feel like someone must have and I just forgot about it.

How did we kill time before smartphones? I honestly can't recall. I have a vague recollection of flipping through magazines in waiting-room-type situations, but what did we do, say, in line at the post office? Waiting for a bus? Waiting for someone to meet us at a restaurant? I mean, did we just look around or something?

I don't know grammar but I do know that I love playing games on my phone.

Happy Days,' 'Laverne & Shirley,' 'Mork & Mindy' - it takes no effort at all to conjure, physically, the profound excitement I felt watching these shows in prime time. I remember sitting on the floor, too close to the TV, rapt.

I loved Garry Marshall. The television shows he created in the '80s were the most deeply important entertainment of my childhood.

Fonzie was impossibly cool.

Mork, played by Robin Williams, was my introduction to improv, and my first real peek behind the curtain of television production; I had seen Williams riffing on 'The Tonight Show' and soon put it together that certain scenes with Mork were not scripted.

It seems the more shallow and mean the candidates are the more they rise in the polls.

When I go in to 'Comedy Bang Bang,' I'll go in most of the time with some beats of where we're going with the idea. Everything else is improvised. Nothing is scripted. A lot of times I'll go in there with nothing and it's just conversation with the character.

When I started my own podcast, I realized I definitely wanted to do characters.

Ultimately, some of these things I did not get paid for, they did not further my career, they were done just for fun.

Part of our job is to dig deep and rediscover the joy that we had when we were first starting out. Also, when you gain responsibility, if you are the host of a TV show and you have responsibilities as a producer and a writer and so forth, you then have to deal with the mechanics of it, which is not always fun.

Some people just want to make up the funny things and play pretend.

I'm fascinated by people who can keep who they are in the midst of this business, which is all about not only pretending to be other people, but also that perception of who you are and how successful you are and your standing in the business.

The old Johnny Carson 'Tonight Show' was great in that he was so good with the guests, and it was not about him. I think he was very smart in realizing 'I have plenty of screentime on this show. I do my monologue and we do sketches and stuff like that.' During the interview, he really made it about trying to bring the best thing out of the guest.

What I do with impressions, I try not to be mean-spirited. To me, it's just about being silly.

Cake Boss, I guess, has been made aware of my impression and finds it amusing and recognizes that it's not a completely accurate impersonation of who he is in his daily life. He seems to be a good sport about it.

The ideas that you find funny and the things that you are offering to an audience are tied up with who you are and your soul and your heart.

Comedy Bang! Bang!' has meant so much to me over the years, and has brought me so much and so many new fans.

A big difference between podcasts and radio is the intimacy. Radio oftentimes feels big and loud. To me, podcasting is closest to that weird late night stuff, whether it's late night love song request lines, or it's some talk radio show where you feel like you're the only person listening to it.

I always like things that shrink the world for me, that make me feel a strange connection, not just to the person that I'm listening to but to the world.

In an effort to devote more time, energy and focus to fewer projects, I've had to make some tough decisions, and one such decision was 'retiring' from 'Speakeasy.'

Well 'The Pod F. Tompkast,' as much as I love the result of it, was a really labor intensive show. There's a lot of writing, there's a lot of scheduling, there's a lot of recording - it's not a show that we can necessarily do in one day because there are so many moving parts to it.

I consume a lot of podcasts. I'm a voracious podcast consumer.

I like 'Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period' podcast.

I love words, and I love that there's so many words available to make a point and to create a picture.

Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don't think of myself as anachronistic - just because I try not to use the word 'like' every other word.

You know, back when I was a kid who wanted to be in show business, everybody on TV wore nice clothes. They were very glamorous when they would be on the 'Tonight Show.' All the dudes wore suits and ties and that just seemed like real show business to me.

When I started doing stand-up in the late eighties, that was not an uncommon thing, that people dressed for the stage. I've seen that change as time has gone by to where, for me, it's something that people remark on. And that's when I started to really embrace it in a way and get more flamboyant and foppish with the way that I dress.

I just approach everything by just doing the best job I can do and try to be a pleasant person.

I long ago vowed, as Batman did before me, never to make fun of stuff that people couldn't help. Because it's (1) easy and (2) not fair. There are plenty of things that people have complete control over that are worthy of ridicule.

When the task is mocking pop culture, it's easy to make sarcastic comments and consider the job done. After a while, I began to feel like this route was completely pointless. Talking about silly, inconsequential stuff doesn't mean you can't put some effort into it.

On 'Best Week Ever,' I met a few previous 'Idol' winners, and they were the nicest young people you'd ever want to meet. It is a tribute to them that they emerged from 'Idol's' cynicism factory seemingly without mercury poisoning of the soul.

I think you can make jokes about anything. But you have to accept that there will be people who don't like it. And they are completely within their rights, just as you are completely within your rights to say whatever you want to say. They're within their rights to react how they're going to react.