NH (Continued): Life is for the living, as they say, and if we can take something that’s unpleasant, that’s a tragedy, that’s miserable and try to get some joy out of it, try to bring some light into the room, let’s do it. A lot of folks would come to a show after a celebrity tragedy, feeling a little bit low, and my job is to cheer people up and help them forget some of their troubles. And really, they have bigger troubles than Whitney Houston passing away. I mean, most of these folks have never even met Ms. Houston, and honestly, neither have I. And also, I don’t have any jokes about her.

JCS: Not yet at least?

NH: Well you like to wait until the right moment. Sometimes the right moment is ten minutes after the person has breathed their last breath. Other times, you wait a while. It’s not necessarily out or respect or anything, it’s about comedic timing. And we will get to the Whitney Houston jokes when it’s appropriate.

JCS: You mentioned earlier about the celebrities not caring about the posthumous jokes you make because they’re going to be worrying about what they’re eating in hell, you seem to have a moral standard for entertainers. You take shots at Courtney Love and the Red Hot Chili Peppers for being immoral, do you care more about their moral standing more than their music? Or do you just assume that your audience is with you, that they hate the music, and attacking their shortcomings is more interesting?

NH: Well look, these people are garbage. They might be part of the brotherhood of entertainment, but they’re letting the brotherhood down. When you’re earning a living peddling raw sewage, that makes all entertainers look bad. When you’re so loaded on god-knows-what, that you can’t produce a decent product because you’re a goddamn mess, you need to be called out. If you have a job working for Pepsi Cola, supplying the vending machines at hotel chains and you keep putting cans in the vending machines that are leaking, and so the inside of the vending machine gets all rusted, and ants and rats and things get into it to get at the sugar that’s leaking from these cans, believe me, the other guys who also work in this industry are also going to talk about you and say, 'this guy’s garbage, he’s ruining our reputation and degrading the quality of the product that we offer.' That’s how I feel about these guys.