Age: 42

Hometown: Portland, Maine

Years in comedy: 16

You started doing stand-up in high school. Did your parents think you'd grow out of it?

Much to my parents' chagrin, when I got out [of college] I just kept doing stand-up. It's been a lot of fun. I've been real lucky.

You were in the cult classic The Boondock Saints. What was that like?

It was really a lot of fun because [Willem Dafoe is] such a great guy to work with, and he's been nominated three times for an Oscar. I'm looking at him thinking, I was at Yuk Yuks in Boise last week.

Your foray into TV didn't go so well. What happened there?

I had been in a deal with [ABC] for about seven years, trying to get a show on the air, and we never shot a pilot.

Once they hire you, they go out and find you a writer - someone that has a deal with the same studio - and you're shotgun-married to this guy. I had one guy who wrote something in a weekend and I was like, "This is awful." So I rewrote the thing and mailed it into ABC myself. They called me back and said, "Your script's much better." We never ended up shooting it.

As an East Coast guy, how do you like performing in the Midwest?

Ohio and Pennsylvania, those are my people. Blue-collar towns. San Jose is not a good market for me. I'm more like an everyman kind of comic. Not blue collar like [Jeff] Foxworthy ... but people usually relate to it very well.

What kind of things do you like to talk about on stage?

I do a lot of stuff about my wife and my kids and my parents.

My wife likes to talk. She likes to put stuff in the story that doesn't belong in the story and it makes it longer and longer. She says to me, "I got up this morning, went to the mall, had to turn around and come back. I went to the grocery store and had to turn around and come back, then I went to the bank. I had to turn around and come back."

I'm like, "Honey, you can leave 'turn around' out of the story next time. Wait a minute - you went to the grocery store, right? How'd you get back? Did you turn around or did you go all the way around the circumference of the Earth?"

What about the rest of your family?

[My daughter's] not afraid to eat. She looks like a little Michelin Man. She's got those chunks running down her arm. I love my kid to death but she's about 10 pounds from being a bouncer at Hooters.

Were your folks big reggae fans?

My dad had no idea there was a singer named Bob Marley.