■ To be a good improviser, you have to listen and you have to relinquish your ideas and build on someone else’s. It’s about trying to be present and serve the greater good. Obviously, the real world is a different playing field, but the improv muscle goes with me wherever I go. I bring it into any room if I’m focused and curious enough and not in my own head.

■ In fourth grade at Queen of Martyrs on the South Side, we got to go to the library. I was into comedy, comedy, comedy, so I looked up “comedy” in the Dewey decimal system, and the only book containing comic material was Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints. For her “successful recipes,” there were just blank pages, then paragraphs of her being funny. It was like finding a pirated tape of the Cure or something.

■ I don’t go to church, but I don’t run from my Catholic upbringing. We had a priest, Father Tom, who had a dark, wicked sense of humor, and I liked that. He wasn’t pretending to be holier than thou. He would talk shit about the parishioners, but he also worked hard to help people. That, to me, was a great lesson.

■ There was an old guy who would walk his dog around the block. We called him Jokes, because every day he’d have some old corny street joke. But by the end of it, I knew the structure and could guess the punch line. So I liked the magic trick of jokes as a young kid. I’ll punish you with the first one I remember writing when I was probably 6: “What’s another name for a grandfather clock? An old-timer.”

■ When I was a psych major at Northern Illinois, I worked on a psych ward at Northwestern with adolescent teens. You would absorb trauma empathology all day, then come home and have to figure out how to get rid of it. I did improv and drank too much and ran around shooting prank videos. Psychology is a beautiful profession, but it has a lot of responsibility.

■ When I got on the Second City touring company, Stephen Colbert was on the Mainstage. And then I got to know him at The Daily Show. The prank element of that show is that you would occasionally go out and character-assassinate nice people to get your sound bite to tell the bigger story. Sometimes you would spend 30 minutes asking fake questions of someone who thought you were interviewing them because they were a great social studies teacher but really you were there to get them to say they believed creationism should be taught in every school. Stephen gave me some great advice. He said, “Don’t have any moral conflicts. You’re selling your soul. Just check it at the door and pick it up when you leave.”

■ I kind of based the Mike McLintock character on Veep on the machine politics that dominated Chicago. You had to know a guy to get a meeting. Mike was a dinosaur. His training was outdated. But he was loyal and empathetic and wasn’t about winning at all costs. I think I’m better at my job than Mike was, but there’s a lot of me in that character.

■ Julia Louis-Dreyfus always told me, “Don’t diminish your instincts. If you feel like your character would wear blue socks, that’s valuable.”