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1. I was supposed to be the doctor in my family.
2. My father just instilled in me that either you’re going to be №1 or nothing at all.
3. Any show that speaks to people of color feels the burden to never mess up, never make its characters look bad — to always get it right.
4. I took organic chemistry, and I got my first-ever F. I ended up going to summer school, and the whole time, I’m thinking, ‘I am not good at sciences.’
5. Wanda Sykes and I have had similar career trajectories. We’re both from the D.C. area. She spent five years working as a contracting specialist for the NSA, and I got my master’s in public health.
6. I came to America when I was six. In true African form, my parents wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer or engineer.
7. I have a saying: Nigerians don’t fit in second place. Everything we do we go hard.
8. As strong as we are, we have our moments. My mama is an African woman who had four kids and was a nurse for 25 years, and she had her moments. I’ve seen her cry.
9. I was looking around this room, this sea of industry folk. If I had have worn black and white, somebody would have asked me to get them a cocktail; the only other people of colour there were servers.
10. Before ‘Insecure,’ I was a wedding emcee — a host for weddings. That’s a world that a lot of people are not familiar with.
11. On a man, I love Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille. But I wear Orchid Soleil — I love a sweet smell.
12. I used to work in public health, and the issues were sustainability, how the funds were being delineated, and if the funds were actually helping the people we think they’re helping.
13. What you see on TV is what you believe you can be.
14. Getting into comedy was difficult for my parents to comprehend. I think now they are really proud I stuck to it.
15. It’s only in acting where I’ve heard in auditions, ‘Can you black it up a little bit? Can you make her a little bit more urban?’ And it’s just like, ‘What?’ I don’t even know the word for that.
16. Every time you’re on stage, you’re acting.
17. Comedy’s the ultimate pill that helps the really hard truths and hard facts go down, right?
18. I’m just gonna talk about being Nigerian-American. I’m gonna talk about being single. I’m gonna talk about what happened to me on the train today. I’m gonna talk about so many other things that, as a comic, you’re able to talk about because you see the world in sarcasm.
19. When something is not great, I’m not going to eat it. It’s not enough to just get full. It’s like, how does this make you feel?
20. There are different types of experiences, and all of them are valid, and all of them deserve to be portrayed in a real way.