First headshot, 1987.   (Photo: @marcmaron/Twitter)

If you do stand-up comedy and keep doing it, there has to be something really wrong with you. It’s relentless. You spend a lot of time being paralyzed with nervousness over a set that might not happen for weeks.

I can’t say it was having a great set necessarily that really compelled me to be a comedian. It was about getting that first real laugh � and probably more about getting it again. For me, it was always about that opening joke. If I can have a strong opener � you get that first laugh, a good laugh � then you’re at least in. You can figure out what the audience is, what they’re willing to give, and what the reaction’s going to be.

There were a couple of openers from the beginning. There was that one about a roommate who was majoring in the Grateful Dead and used to have flashbacks of the refrigerator. But the first one that really worked was this ridiculous joke that I used to do when I was an open-miker. I would come out onstage and I would put the mike stand on top of the stool. It would just sit there like that. And I would let it sit there and just say, �I recently went to the Museum of Modern Art.� Once they put it together, it got this weird building laugh usually. It’s not an easy joke necessarily: You have to make this leap and have to have some sort of point of reference of the ridiculousness of Dada. Maybe it was a little divisive, but it was not in any way controversial. I thought it was pretty clever and generally it would get me in. I don’t know where it came from, really, it was probably improvised or I probably got it in the Museum of Modern Art. There was another joke I did where I used the mike stand as an examination tool for a doctor who wanted to touch a guy’s dick.