Whereas my writing always used to be on the page (or on the computer), now it’s certainly a combination of that with writing on stage. Which is obviously what a lot of people do these days. Big guys like Bill Burr or Louis C.K. explicitly say, “Oh, I never write anything down, I always just think of something and I go on. The stage brain is where it’s at.” I’m not sitting at home, with a thesaurus or a dictionary, trying to figure out the exact words that need to be used; it still is, mostly, the ones that come to you.

JCS: So early on in your career, if it hit, it stayed; if it didn’t, you jettisoned the material. Now you’re more willing to work through a bit to find something that works?

MK: I would say yes. Although, it would never be one time and done for something that didn’t work, if I thought it was good. Emo Philips said something that resonated with me. He was asked, “Are you better at writing now?” And he said he thought that his ratio of successful ideas to unsuccessful ideas has not changed, but that he has grown better at accurately picking the ones that will be successful.

Now, if a new idea doesn’t hit, I’ll keep with it more than I would in the past. That’s the main difference. In the beginning, I’d have a one-line thing; if it didn’t work, I’d try it again the next night, and if it still didn’t work, I’d stop trying. Whereas now, I might even stick with it more in the moment, be like, “Well what was it about those? Did I not say all the things about it that make it funny?” The jokes I put on Twitter now are more like the jokes that I would tell more regularly in the past, like, “I saw Alex Cross yesterday, and I recommend everyone Cross that off your list.” 

JCS: Twitter has become a place for you to keep doing those short-form jokes, wordplay jokes; do you have a particular mentality concerning your use of Twitter? Do you feel a responsibility to temper, edit, or have a certain number of tweets per day?