There’s a great article about Zach up right now. Here’s a few of my favorite quotes:

Galifianakis looked out at the crowd as the trio played on, beaming as childishly as anyone else in the room. He appeared to have forgotten, along with the audience, that he was the featured performer of the evening. “That’s not really a joke,” a 30ish man just in front of me observed to the woman beside him. She nodded at him and kept laughing.

This one about how he felt after the end of his VH1 show:

“When you go from having your own talk show to doing stand-up in a bowling alley,” he said finally, “you can react by getting mad or depressed, or by just going away, like people expect you to.” He took in a slow, thoughtful breath. “I reacted by growing my beard.”

About his racist jokes:

“It’s not a selfless thing,” he told me. “Wherever there’s something that people don’t feel comfortable talking about, that’s where the good jokes are. People might misunderstand you, but I decided, right after my show was canceled, never to dumb my material down for anybody. A bad comic follows his audience, catering to whatever they want; a good comic will always lead.”

About harvesting the awkwardness of his audience:

When I asked whether setting up the audience that way was satisfying for a comic — revenge, of a kind, for being misunderstood — Galifianakis surprised me by shaking his head soberly. “That’s one of the great things about comedy: we can — and should — say the things that other people aren’t supposed to say. If we didn’t do that, if we didn’t push against those limits, we’d just be standing around onstage and yelling.”