I've always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby - more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics - Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle - you get to see them a bunch, and you go, 'Wow, this is where I need to be.'

Al Madrigal

Categorized in : You See Great Comedy

Near my house in Los Angeles is a waterfall. I love to take the wife and kids, but it's also near a sketchy neighborhood. So there's a lot of gang members that hang out at the waterfall. It's like somebody took an Ansel Adams photo and then put a Cypress Hill video inside it.

Al Madrigal

gang-members wife kids

I bullshit on the phone all day with a variety of people discussing various projects, and occasionally write jokes.

Al Madrigal

phones writing people

The horrible truth is that I am lazy and I am going to write and do bits that just hand themselves to me.

Al Madrigal

lazy writing hands

You grow up real quick, a half-Mexican in a sailor's suit, because I'd be riding the streetcar to school everyday - minding my own business, humming out a 'Frere Jacques' - and I realized that in any other town, this might be considered cute. But you know what it is in San Francisco? Sexy.

Al Madrigal

growing-up sexy cute

I'm always alone. Sad face emoticon.

Al Madrigal

always-alone sad-face faces

Well, once I fried tofu and put Sriracha on it. After that I was so depressed I swore off preparing food for myself altogether.

Al Madrigal

preparing-food tofu wells

Don't bring your sand toys to the park. That's another bad move. Because I go to the park, and I'm on the Vicodin and a little weed too - let's face it - and I go in there, and my wife's like, 'Bring the sand toys! Bring the sand toys!' And I know what happens every single time: I become sand toy repo man from the eight little kids that run off in nine different directions with my sand toys.

Al Madrigal

weed running moving

I'm half-Mexican - get used to it 'cause in about five to 10 years, you're all gonna be related to one. Whether you like it or not, no matter how much you prepared your family, you're gonna show up at Thanksgiving one of these years, you're gonna walk in and say, 'Hey! What's happening? Since when did we start serving flan?' Well, what's happening is that somebody's boning a Latino.

Al Madrigal

hey mexican years

We're down in Mexico. It's for a bachelor party, so we go into a Mexican strip club... I go back with this woman down a murky hallway, and then without missing a beat - these ladies are all business - she goes, 'Go ahead, take out your dong.' 'I'm not taking out my dong. And by the way, who uses the word dong? If you want to be hip to the lingo, they're not using the word dong up in the States.

Al Madrigal

mexican party missing

Im so sick of people treating Latinos like some homogenous group that all feel the same way about everything.

Al Madrigal

sick people way

Stop throwing us all together like some sort of Puerto Ricaminican Tex-Mex buffet.

Al Madrigal

buffets throwing together

My primary responsibility is to be funny.

Al Madrigal

primaries responsibility

I once called a guy into his own office and spun around in his own chair to greet him. That kind of thing may be why I quit, before I got into serious trouble. I would smile and the person would get so upset. But you do a thousand of those things, and it makes you weird.

Al Madrigal

weird you smile serious

When my son was 3 years old - I'll never forget this - there was this homeless guy walking toward us, and my son looked at me, and he said, 'Who's your buddy?'

Al Madrigal

me never-forget walking son

There are comics in L.A. doing impressions, and the first thing they do is hunch over and then start to do this bad Rick Moranis voice I do as well when I really get going. It's pretty horrible.

Al Madrigal

doing bad start voice

I don't really move onstage; all I do is just gradually hunch more and more and jut out at the people in the front row.

Al Madrigal

out more just people

There's no reason anybody should be reading too much into 'Thrift Shop.' I just have because I have a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old who are really into going to lyric websites, hitting print, and printing lyrics for every song that's popular.

Al Madrigal

too-much reading reason song

My daughter, who is 7 years old - I have no idea where she learned this - she made a video where she's beat-boxing. We have no idea where the beat-boxing came from, but all of a sudden, there it was. Now we're launched into lyric sheets for every single song that is current. They're all over our house.

Al Madrigal

single daughter house song

My daughter plays keyboard very well, and my son plays guitar, and they're totally into music.

Al Madrigal

guitar daughter music son

You re-watch 'Napoleon Dynamite', and there's a lot of thrift shopping that goes on in that movie; there's a lot of funny stuff. It's definitely amusing, and paying 99 cents for a samurai sword is amazing.

Al Madrigal

amazing you shopping funny