I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.
And it was a huge emotional thing to leave the law and become unemployed - to be a student again.
I used to have a theory actually that, if you've had a good childhood, a good marriage and a little bit of money in the bank, you're going to make a lousy comedian.
The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.
My influences were Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce.
The odd thing about comedy is that the more personal you are, the larger the audience.
My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.
Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.
On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' it takes almost a year to get 10 shows written. It always reminds me of my old yeshiva days, where you used to sit over a piece of Talmud and analyze everything that was going on.
