It's a big game tomorrow, obviously, quarter finals. I think that whenever you play the Russians you always get up for it, and tomorrow is going to be even that much bigger, the quarter finals.

When you perform in front of an audience after only two days of rehearsal, you're flying by the seat of your pants - particularly when they're rewriting the show right up to the moment the camera goes on.

There's a great deal of disturbance in this country and how black feel about what happened in Katrina, and, you know, many of the comics, many of performers are in Las Vegas and New Orleans trying to raise money for what happened there

I'm a performer. I push the envelope, I work in a very uncontrolled manner onstage. I do a lot of free association, it's spontaneous, I go into character.

I lost my temper on stage.

Aerobics is a really whacked-out way to get going. The loud rock 'n' roll music and the teachers standing before you, doing the exercises and screaming into the microphone, Go! Go! Go for the burn!

I'll get to the force field of this hostility, why it's there, why the rage is in any of us, why the trash takes place, whether or not it's between me and a couple of hecklers in the audience or between this country and another nation, the rage

I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this.

There's a lot of labor involved in the birth of a new town.

I'm trained as an actor for the stage - classically trained, believe it or not - and I worked closely with Stella Adler for years. People don't know that much about it. They just think I am these people. But I've been in this comedy racket, because it's just how everybody wants to see me.