[Wyatt Cenac’s show at Ottobar has been moved to July 11. Tickets will be honored, and refunds are available at place of purchase.]

Comedian Wyatt Cenac, best known for his stint as a correspondent on The Daily Show, brings his stand up to the Ottobar on Thursday. He hasn’t spent much time in the Charm City, but mentioned he’d like to feast on a crab cake while he’s here—we pointed him in the direction of Faidley’s. He talked to Baltimore magazine about life after The Daily Show, Twitter, and that one time he (almost) sold a joke to Saturday Night Live.

What can the audience expect from the show Thursday night?

That’s a good question. My hope is that they will enjoy it and that they will laugh, but I don’t want to make any guarantee because that puts way too much pressure on me. I don’t want people like, “You said I’d laugh 79 times and I only laughed 76, you owe me.”

How would you describe your stand up to people who haven’t seen it before?

A lot of me crying. That’s always a weird question . . . I kind of put that on other people to describe and explain . . . I’ve got some dumb jokes, I’ve got a couple smart ones. Sometimes I’m silly. I’m hopefully entertaining. But yeah, tough to describe.

What’s life been like for you post The Daily Show?

It’s been interesting, it’s definitely different . . . I did a lot for The Daily Show, but now I’m traveling doing stand up, so I get a little more time in places, I get to see cities a little bit more. I was just in Australia for the Melbourne Comedy Festival . . . Something like that, where I was gone for two weeks, I couldn’t have done that when I was on the show . . . But I loved working on the show and I definitely miss the speed with which you could respond to things. You saw something strange or amusing or maddening in the news and you had an outlet where you could almost immediately go and write something about it and make a joke about it . . . The rush of doing the show is not the same as writing a concise little quip on Twitter and then checking in with it every two minutes to see if people have favorited or retweeted it.

Have you brought any of The Daily Show to your stand up?

I haven’t too much. As a stand-up comic, I was always talking about things that were topical, so I don’t know if that’s changed too much . . . If anything, it’s been refined by having been at The Daily Show . . . You want to be able to talk about things that people have some frame of reference for. And the challenge for anybody, but especially the stand up, is you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re like, “Ok, now I have to give you the back story and all the players.”

What did you think about the outrage that surfaced regarding new host Trevor Noah’s tweets that were seen as offensive to women and Jews?

Twitter’s one of those things that’s a very strange medium. It’s one that I’ve not tried to engage in that much because it feels like, oh yeah, it’s a platform where people can tell jokes, but it’s not a comedy club. You’re preforming for an audience you don’t actually know you’re preforming for . . . Especially for comedians, I feel like they end up throwing everything out there because they want the response . . . I’ve seen Trevor do stand up, and he’s a very thoughtful and funny stand up . . . I’ve never heard him do stuff like that on stage. I think Jon [Stewart] said it best, I don’t think that those Tweets are all of who Trevor is, or are the most representative of who Trevor is. He’s got the show and in time he will hopefully earn the trust and appreciation of his audience.

Is doing stand up where you want to be, or are you working towards another platform?

The hope is always to try to get another platform. I have ideas that I’ve had for television. I love television as a medium; I’d like to go back into it. The difficulty is finding a partner, a network [that] wants to work with you and the specific idea you have. Since I’ve left the show, I’ve probably sold five pilots . . . they just haven’t moved forward.

Can you give us an idea of what the shows are like that you’re pitching?

They’re ideas that I love, but are technically failures, so it’s kind of a strange thing to talk about . . . I sold a scripted show to AMC that didn’t move forward that . . . took place at a car dealership in Texas. It definitely had some influence of both having lived in Texas and my time at King of the Hill. I pitched a pilot of a puppet show to BBC America . . . I still love animation and I pitched a puppet show because it seemed like a perfect combination of work in both worlds. It takes a long time to make an animated show and with puppets I can do all the things I want to do in an animation show, but a little faster . . . I sold a topical show to Comedy Central a few years back . . . that was a show about social issues and that didn’t move forward. There’s more in the mix that have died. [laughs] I sold a show to IFC and it died, but it may get a breath of fresh air, but who knows.

Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed for you.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

You spent some of your childhood in Dallas and now live in Brooklyn. Back when you started doing stand up in college at University of North Carolina, did your comedy draw from your experiences in New York and Dallas?

No . . . I had done an internship at Saturday Night Live and, while I was there, I would write jokes for “Weekend Update” and try and submit them. At the time, people faxed in jokes and if they used one of your jokes, you’d get $100. And when I heard that, I thought, “I want to make money.” They would send you set ups, and set ups would just be first sentences from USA Today and you’d write the punch line. A lot of my jokes early on were just failed “Weekend Update” jokes and then occasionally just a weird, venty rant from my own life. At the time I was working at a sporting goods store. Just a lot of failed “Weekend Update” jokes and the complaints of a man who sold sneakers to people.

Did any of your submissions ever make it on Saturday Night Live?

I had one joke that made it, but somebody else in the writer’s room had made the same joke, so I didn’t get credit for it . . . the punch line was almost identical. On some level, $100 would have been nice, but I remember taking some sort of pride that me in North Carolina and this guy in New York, there’s a parallel thought that happened there. There’s a sign that…I can do this.

Tickets to the Thursday show are still available here. Doors open at 8.