Al Madrigal quotes:

I'm delighted to carry on in the tradition of the great reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, and Geraldo Rivera to probe vitally important issues of the day, starting with whether I'm Hispanic or Latino.

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

I'm always alone. Sad face emoticon.

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

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?'

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

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.

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

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

I was well-dressed and good at firing people because I really did care. I cared about giving them the opportunity to talk through the situation and was always sincere. I would explain that 'This was a bad match,' and they were probably meant to do other things if they weren't giving their all to this, which paid $10 a hour.

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.

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.

I'm not much for setup... punch line. I talk about my kids. I talk about my wife.

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.

I was a corporate hatchet man, and it's impossible for me to turn that off. It's this curse when I walk into businesses: 'That needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed.'

I've always been 'ethnic friend,' without any serious moments, all jokes.

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.

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

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.

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.

My primary responsibility is to be funny,