During his appearance on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, SNL creator Lorne Michaels described alternative comedy as “a stage” and that “You can’t hide behind art.”

I’d agree with that. Alternative comedy is kind of like semantics. It’s a dated term. I don’t even know what’s considered alternative or what’s considered mainstream anymore. When the Ali G Show came out I considered that alternative comedy, and then Borat was the biggest comedy movie of the past decade.

I don’t consider myself an alt comic, I don’t consider myself not an alt comic. It’s all comedy. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. You gotta be funny first.

Something that happened with Borat was, for certain sections of the audience, the element of satire got lost, and the character became a racist catchphrase. Similarly, Dave Chappelle is still hounded by quotes from the Rick James sketch. Do you ever worry about some of your bits turning into that?

It’s how you process it. The burden of artistic interpretation is not on the artist, it’s on the viewer. That’s why Stanley Kubrick would never give interviews. He was like “It’s not my job to tell you how you’re supposed to think about my movies or how you feel about my movies or what you take away from my movies.” He’s like, “That’s your job, I don’t want to tell you, because it’s going to narrow your experience and be like this what I was doing and there’s just one answer out there.” It makes it this very narrow, small thing.

Do you feel your comedy is a reaction against being interpreted?

No. I don’t have an agenda. I just write what’s funny. We just try to crack each other up. We start out our mornings with dumb ideas. Everybody in the writer’s room, we try to come up with the stupidest idea possible and we try to out stupid idea each other. Just to warm up and rev the engine and take the pressure off of coming up with something great, and those end up being the best bits. That’s all the shit we keep. A room full of the smartest minds we know, personally, coming up with the dumbest ideas. My writing partner, Dan Curry, he’s a major creative force behind the show. The hardest I’ve ever laughed in my life is just hanging out with him. He’s like a brother to me. We both prop each other up.

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What are some ideas you’ve had that were too impractical or not cleared by legal that you’ve wanted to do?

All the time. The intro to each show, we call it set destruction. One time we wanted to do an underwater set destruction and we were going to drive out to a giant tank in San Diego and get these underwater scuba-certified camera operators and build the whole set in this water tank and do an entire underwater set scene, but it was so expensive, so time consuming, and we tried two seasons in a row to produce it and it was just completely impossible. Recently, we were going to do a bit where a transgender woman and a transgender man are posing as PAs next to the camera during an interview and they were going to slowly undress and reveal that they have the opposite genitalia than you’d thought that they’d have. And then they were going start fucking each other. That was an issue, just to bring people fucking each other in front of a guest who has no idea that that’s about to happen. We could get in a lot of trouble.

The law is the law. I mean, our lawyer is on our side. It’s just legal advice, it’s legal counsel. You could get sued, you could go to jail, it’s not worth it. I went to jail during season one. It wasn’t worth it. I crashed a town hall meeting while the mayor was speaking. I ran up to the podium and said, “Vote for me for class president and I’ll put beer in the water fountains and cameras in the girls’ locker rooms. Don’t taze me bro!” There was like 20 sheriffs there and I told the sheriff my name was John Coltrane. They threw me in jail. Just for the night. But I had to go to court and get a lawyer. Very expensive.