When I was a kid I would save my allowance to buy comedy records. I would buy Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson. I would memorize them and then go to school and do them and get in trouble for doing them at school. But I remember my parents would get me out of bed to entertain their friends. My momma would say, “Get out here and do that chicken-heart thing.”

When you talk to people that I grew up with in Hapeville, Ga., none of them are surprised that this is what I do. They would tell you this is what I’ve always done. I guess I didn’t think growing up that you could do this for a living. And so I did it that first night 20 years ago, and it’s like a light bulb went off, and it was a proud moment when I quit IBM too. You can imagine my mother’s bosom swelling with pride at that moment.

I’ve been lucky that I have made people laugh in a lot of different ways, whether it was a sitcom, a book or records. And if you look in my office, there are at least 20 piles of stuff. I’ve always got stuff I’m thinking about and working on, so I never get bored. But if you put a gun to my head and said, “Alright you can’t do but one,” there wouldn’t be any hesitation. It would be stand-up. I mean there is something about being able to look people in the eye and see them laugh, and see them elbow each other that you can’t replace. And the longer I’ve done it; I appreciate it so much more. There’s a lot of musicians and there are a lot of actors, but there are very few people who do stand-up and make that their life’s work. A lot of people get into it, as a springboard for other stuff, like Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, David Spade or Drew Carey.

There are a lot of people who start off in stand-up and move on to other stuff, and just moved on and never went back to pick it up. Then you have a few people like Cosby. Cosby is worth over a billion dollars…a billion! And he still goes out and does stand-up on the weekends. He ain’t doing it for the money; he is doing it because he loves doing it.

Seinfeld still does it, and Jerry ain’t doing it for the money. And so as I hit 20 years of it, I realize that that’s me. I don’t have to do it anymore, but I love doing it. When we were doing the sitcom, Seinfeld and I shot right next to each other and I remember talking to him one day about the sitcom business and that is was long days and it was rehearse and rewrite, rehearse and rewrite, and then you shoot it in little two or three minute segments and then someone took it away to edit it and you didn’t even get to see it. You never saw the finished product; you just started working on the next one.

With stand-up, you knew two seconds out of your mouth if it was funny or if it wasn’t funny. But there was a thrill to that, and still is a thrill to it. And you would think that after 20 years you would be to the point to where you would just know if something was gonna work or not, but you just don’t. And that’s the danger and the thrill in it. I mean I still go out there and think that they’re gonna love this and you tell it, and it just kind of lays there and you’re like “Oh, no!” And you’re like, “Alright let’s start digging, let’s get out of this hole.”