Aisha Tyler
I can tell you this: Stand-up is not glamorous.
I'm sure I had low-level scurvy all of my childhood.
And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.
I'm such a geek, and have always been a real nerd.
I really do know football.
People challenge my nerd cred all the time. I just show them the photo of me winning my middle-school science fair, wearing my Casio calculator watch and eyeglasses so big they look like they can see the future.
When I get old and slow down I want to look behind me and see all the fire and the wreckage and no stone left unturned.
You rarely see women being nice to each other on television anymore.
I am absolutely a Giants fan and I'm a Dynasty baby so I was a 49ers fan for a long time.
Maybe the nails are a little stubby and gnawed on, but I definitely do not have man hands.
I love Toronto. I love it. I love Toronto. I love Canada. I can't wait to get back. Can't wait to have some Timbits.
I like grown up comedy.
You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.
But I love stand-up, and it's where I came from creatively, so it's something I never want to walk away from.
So much of a stand-up's life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.
I'm just myself, so I don't know that I think of myself as a nerd icon.
I'm sure you can imagine it's pretty frustrating to have people talking about your private life who don't know anything about it.
My husband and I met when I was a teenager, and I've been with him for more than half of my adult life.
It's very hard when you love someone very much to also start to realize that maybe you want different things for your lives.
Marriage is hard. I'm not gonna lie.
Marriage is a blood sport. Marriage is jousting. It's disembowelment. It's just terrible, terrible visceral injuries. It's not for everybody.
One thing about creativity is, when you feel confident and respected, you're more likely to pitch more interesting stuff because you're not as precious with it. You feel like, 'This is going to land, and I'm going to be supported in this.'
The whole principle of coming out is that everyone knows someone who's gay. The minute someone comes out, no one can be a bigot, because someone they love is gay.
I was with someone at 19, and I was married at 23, and I didn't want kids when I was in my 20s.
I wasn't mentally prepared to take care of them, I was focused on my career. And then when I got to be in my 40s and I thought about having kids, I wasn't able to have kids naturally. I don't regret it.
I won't apologize for choosing my career over kids.
I married my college boyfriend, so I've been with him since I was a kid.
Sunday is like this entertainment scrum for me, because I've only got a day, one day of fun. So I want to have brunch, and I want to see a movie, and I want to watch 'Game of Thrones,' and I'm trying to watch 'The Sopranos' from the beginning, and I want to play four hours of video games. So, it's, like, as regimented as my work life.
I grew up on the back of a motorcycle - my dad didn't have a car until I was a teenager.
I have a lot of good girlfriends that I really love, but you know, most of my close friends are men.
I was always a theatrical kid.
I acted out a lot. I was very nerdy. I was very isolated, which I made up for by kind of talking and trying to entertain people and get them to like me, so I did theatre and improv in high school and college, but always as a hobby.
I've always been an outsider.
A belief in feminism is a belief in personal freedom - the freedom to live a life free of fear of violence, to select a fulfilling career and be compensated fairly, to choose when to start a family, to marry whom you love. I want everyone, regardless of gender, to live a life free of restriction or fear, able to pursue their own personal brand of happiness and fulfillment.Collection: Careers
Nothing really worth having is easy to get. The hard-fought battles, the goals won with sacrifice, are the ones that matter.Collection: Motivational
Karaoke is the great equalizer.Collection: Inspirational
You can only really learn from failure ... To win, you need to fail, and fail hard.Collection: Fun
The best advice anybody could have given me was to keep getting up over and over again.Collection: Advice
No one wants to hear about how awesome you were; people want to hear about the time you blew it. So I think the longer you do stand-up, the more comfortable you are. You stop wanting to hide your foibles and instead want to show who you are.Collection: Thinking
Real success and accomplishment, at whatever it is you are passionate about, requires real work. Real sacrifice. Real disappointment. Real failure. And it requires the ability to scrape your sorry ass up off the floor, stumble to your feet, wipe the rivulets of watery drool from your face, and do it again, like an obstinate toddler running against the wall with his head in a bucket.Collection: Running
I don't want to be pandered to, so I try not to pander.Collection: Trying
When I was young I thought, 'Yeah, people don't see, they're not recognizing how funny I am, and how talented I am'. And the guys that mentored me were like, 'You just have to keep getting up'. And I look back and they were right. They were all right.Collection: People
Marriage is a mystery and part of it is just being kind to each other, not being selfish.Collection: Selfish
I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don't tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards. When I was younger, those kinds of comments bothered me, but eventually got to a point where I realized I wasn't going to change who I was.Collection: Order
Successful people just don't let failure define them or keep them from doing what they want to do. For example, I'd have people come up to me after my shows, and they'd say they want to do stand-up but are scared they're going to fail. I'd tell them, "You are going to fail, and anyone who is success has powered through many, many failures."Collection: Successful
If you haven't noticed yet, working sucks. Unless you are a racecar driver or an astronaut or Beyonce, working is completely and utterly devoid of awesome. It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon. If you ever needed to ruin someone's fun, I mean really poop a party, just move things to the workplace. Fun terminated.Collection: Fun
I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.Collection: Childhood
I think I was only attracted to drunken douches before I got married.Collection: Thinking
I visualize myself winning the Olympic Pentathlon, inventing a phone that can be controlled by brain waves, or doing the laundry. I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.Collection: Lying