On his most recent Comedy Central special, "New in Town," he includes an endearing video of two comics sitting on a couch with him, ridiculing his act, joke by joke.
I tell him that, only the night before, I had been to a standup comedy night down the road, organised by Judd Apatow, where one of the acts joked about telling her kids that if they did badly in school they'd have to work alongside the Mexicans.
Their act featured jokes about prison camps, however, suggesting at least a small edge of anxiety.
Kathy Buckley covers familiar ground in her comedy act, making jokes about the telephone company, relationships and her mother.
His act included jokes about his sweat tasting like chocolate, and he even – to his regret – accepted a part in the Black and White Minstrel show.
Contemporary Christian comedy's first real star was a self-proclaimed ex-hippie named Mike Warnke, whose act combined jokes, sermons, and hair-raising tales about his past as a satanic high priest.
One critic said of his act: "The jokes have power because of the sheer audacity of the wordplay, and a surprisingly high proportion of them are inspired, in a warped sort of way.
There is a similar bifurcation in drama: while the film shows the delightfully homemade sound effects being created for a broadcast of Macbeth, the lighter end of theatre is represented by Eric Maschwitz, the debonair head of variety, seen urging a producer to make sure a music-hall act's jokes are cleaned up ("It won't get by for a moment, old boy").
Three salesmen in the office spend most of the first act cracking jokes about religion (one does a funny impersonation of a revivalist preacher); debating the qualities of dark-skinned versus light-skinned women; and swapping clients, with whom they are having sex, as if they were baseball cards.
Matt Groening listed the episode as being his eighth favorite episode, and the aroused cow is one of his all-time favorite act break jokes.
