I love doing stand-up for crowds because this right here, this reminds me of assembly in grade school. And assembly was the only part of school I ever liked. Once you leave school, you don’t get to have assembly. This is the closest we get in adult life to assembly. ‘Cause look at you all, you’re just sitting there in chairs, looking at a guy with absolutely no expertise, who’s going to talk for a while. Although this is different than assembly because you bought tickets, you knew this was coming. Assembly you never knew was coming when you were a kid. You just showed up at 8:00 a.m. and they were like, “Put down your stuff. Go to the gym.” You’re like, “God, I guess they’re finally going to kill us all. All right. This is younger than I thought I would be but we are pretty big assholes.” You get to the gym and the whole school is sitting on the floor. You’re like, “What are we, about to graduate from Tuesday?” My principal would always come out to kick things off. She’d be like, “Children, rather than continue to teach you how to read, we have cleared the entire day for this random guy.” [imitating New York accent] “I used to smoke crack! As you seven and eight-year-olds probably know, freebasing is the greatest orgasm known to man. But I’m here to tell you there’s hope. I’ve been sober now two weeks. Well, weekdays, not weekends. Weekends, that’s Nunzio’s time.”

I was once in assembly listening to a guy talk about smoking crack. My social studies teacher yelled at me, “Sit up straight! Show some respect.” I was like, “He’s smoking cocaine.” “Sit up straight”? He’s standing on a 45-degree angle. Or, as junkies call it, first position.

I always got yelled at assembly. That’s right. There was always assembly and then, like, that second assembly to yell at you for how you behaved at the first assembly. They’d be like, “Get in here! Sit down. I want to talk about what happened yesterday.” You’re like eight years old, “What’s yesterday?” “We invite a woman here with homemade puppets to teach you about bullying through skits and you laugh at this woman? We noticed you had all been bullying each other and making fun of everything constantly. So we invite a woman with straight gray hair, in a denim dress, with a wrist- cast and homemade puppets that all have the same voice to teach you about bullying through skits, and you, ha-ha-ha, laugh it up. What was so funny about that woman? I want to know. What was so funny about when she couldn’t fit the box of puppets back into the trunk of her Dodge Neon? What was so hilarious that you all ran to the windows? Well, you all missed a valuable lesson on the danger of cliques.” “What’s a clique?” “It’s when a group of people hang out together.” “Oh, you mean like having friends?” “No, because these people make fun of other people.” “Oh, you mean like having friends?”