Let’s see, I find out I was born with both looks and personality? No, it’s weird to not have anything coming back. I’m imagining you all laughing on mute. What else? My imaginary friend from childhood comes back as an adult and we have a lesby affair. Steve and Brian have a great … this season; their love as well as Jay and Laura; there’s some wedding action, and it’s very funny; there’s a new mayor in town who makes gay sex and brunch illegal. I should just look through the—let’s see, I go on “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Let’s see, Andy Samberg plays my imaginary friend this year. Ed Asner is in an episode as a Nazi war criminal. It was really, really—let me tell you something about older actors. Ed Asner is about 80, and Murray, who is on our show, Gershams, is 87, and they’re such pros that when they’re not shooting, they are in their chair sleeping. Just like containing their energy. And we have some really great pictures of elderly Nazi war criminals in set chairs sound asleep.

Billy Crudup plays himself on the show in an episode. I know you didn’t ask who guest stars were. Let me think. There’s some heavy psychedelic drug-taking in an episode. There’s a lot of drugs this season, actually.

Let me think; let me think a … second. I’m just reacting to nobody. Let me think—oh God, I need to drink this coffee that’s in front of me. C’mon Sarah, you’re embarrassing yourself.

I try to fight the taboo of child molesters and vans. Oh, my God, my brain, my brain. This is going to look so cool on a transcript; lots of dot, dot, dots, and little breakdowns.

It was written as a drama. Rob Schrab, actually, who directs most of the episodes, and writes so much and created the show with me, wrote this episode; and he wrote the “A” story like it’s a drama. I don’t think it’s like a very special “Family Ties,” but I think you might get choked up at the end.

But shock—I don’t think we go like, "Ooh, that will really shock them." I mean, does anything shock anyone anymore? I think we kind of hopefully reach beyond that a little bit with our fart jokes, no. But, I think that this season there is actually growth and character arc and stuff. Hopefully still just really dumb and funny and silly. And anything smart you can infer from it from you smart brain is great. I don’t know that it’s pure shock value. I don’t know how long that can last, and maybe that’s what you’re saying. I feel like we’ve got a really, really full season.

Usually in the room, someone will just start, get a snag in their brain of a—there’s an episode where Steve writes a song that becomes famous called, "I’m glad you hurt your hand because Brian like hurts his hand." That just came from the writer’s room of me. Rob Schrab hit his hand, and I was in an extra obnoxious … mode, and I just started going, "I’m glad you hurt your hand. I’m glad you hurt your hand." Then Rob wrote it into the script.

We didn’t expect it so much, that none of us knew they were even announcing the Emmy nominees. I just woke up to my alarm clock and looked on my phone, and saw like eight calls, and I thought there was an emergency. It just never occurred to us ever, and then it was so great. We couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it, and we’re so happy that anyone, especially the hoity-toits, would appreciate our show as much as we do. It was awesome.

It would have been great to have some sort of momentum with the other award shows in the season, but we weren’t eligible for any of the others; Golden Globes or SAG Awards, or any of that stuff because we weren’t on the air in 2009, at all. It will have been 14 months since the last time we were on when we air on February 4th. You’d think we were “The Sopranos” or “Lost” with these gaps, and not a 21-1/2 minute show about fart jokes, but we’ll take it. We really love it. We love being together and making this super-super dumb, funny, silly show.

But, that said; people go, "Well, he got so much money," and that’s nice that he got money, but he loves that job. Also, he got the money, but the rest of the whole crew doesn’t, and he’s got …. He’s a good guy. I think they all probably feel real displaced, and abandoned. And they have every right to feel that way.

I can’t help but hope that he lands at FOX or somewhere, anywhere. Wherever he lands, he’ll always have an audience. I just thought that that was a real … move on NBC’s part. And then on top of it, of course the last week or two of the show was just amazing, you know?

Sarah Silverman: I’m there the whole time. I’m one of the writers. There’s just like five of us, so there’s never a problem. There hasn’t been much turnover; it’s been like Dan Sterling and Rob Schrab and I, and then John Schroeder, tall John, he’s 6”10”, and Harris Wittels and Chelsea Peretti, and our writer’s assistant, Eric Schaer, who’s written two great scripts in the past two season. But, it’s just a small group. We work out of my apartment usually the first three weeks, because we never have office space when we finally get picked up.

So it’s very intimate. My hands are all over it, but also, the guys know me so well; sometimes more than I know myself.

They’re great about it. They never really sensor us, and even the standard and practices people can make is crazy, but really as long as we can give them a way to defend it, they’ll let us go. They just always need to know how to defend something that they’re worried about.

I know that gays belong to Kathy, but any fall over, I’m not going to take. I’m just so grateful to Logo. They didn’t even think twice about helping us, and in terms of the content, never, ever had even a request. They really are amazing over there, and I can’t express how grateful we all are for them, because we wouldn’t have had a third season without them, and they asked for nothing in return. The fact that their end of the bargain is that they get to air the episodes, it’s like really? It’s amazing to us, too. Its so win-win and we’re just so grateful. So totally grateful.

The behind the scenes stuff is really cool on it, actually, because we always just have somebody around with a flip camera or something, backstage, and they grab us between scenes, or whatever, and make something cool out of it. And then, just all the episodes.

There’s just this crazy pool of talent, and Justin does this great animation, so we just kind of gave him free rein, and he would write cartoons and stuff, and grab us in between scenes to record them. And that’s that.

Actually, there’s a quote from "Family Guy," that’s so brilliant about that, that encapsulates exactly how I feel about it, which is like—oh, I’m not going to say it right, but it’s—you know the father, Peter, and the son—what’s his name, Chris? Chris is like, "Well, we’re fat," and Peter goes, "Chris, fat guys aren’t fat. Only fat women are fat." It’s just so true in our society, and it bums me out to make—it never makes me laugh, it just makes me go, "Ugh."

Sometimes it’s hard. I have dark times. Honestly, I’m pretty much a happy person, and I like being happy. I like being content. I think people that romanticize it don’t really know how bad it is, like sadness.

There was a time, actually—you know when you’re just like—I don’t cry a lot, but I felt like tears had been filling me up for days, and I’d been pressing down. Then I was shooting one morning, a bunch of the …, so I’m in my pretend bed with my real dog, and we’re about to shoot all the good nights, and it just happened where literally Rob said, "Action” and I went to talk and nothing came out. And just like tears. I felt so—and it was just one of those things where I said, "I’m sorry. I’m sorry." It just almost became totally physical. I just was like—and they were, “It’s okay. Let’s take five.” And half of me is crying, I don’t even know why, and half of me is crying because I just feel so bad for holding things up.

It’s just so cool, because my real life sister plays my sister, and she was there to do the scene after that, and so they were like, "Do you want us to get Laura?" And I was like, “Yes.” And she came in and she got into my pretend bed, and just rubbed my hair and told me stories about when I was little, and it just made everything better. It was just such a sweet, weird, bizarre, but homey, almost, experience. And then I felt better, and I was like, “I feel better, but I’m afraid to call the crew back, because I know when I see their faces, I’ll cry. Because they love me.”

But we ended up making the day, no problem. It was good. It was just one of those big cries that you don’t expect every couple years, and it was so weird. But I think of it almost fondly, because I just love those guys so much, and to have my own sister right there was nice.

But there’s four of us, four girls, and we’re all really close. Sometimes I just feel bad for people without sisters. I remember one time I was having a fight with a boyfriend, and I was like forwarding all our emails of stuff to my three sisters. And we’re having a whole conversation by email about, "If he said this, and you should …," and I accidentally copied him in one, and he literally saw the whole thing. But I was just like, "You know what? Whatever you say to me, you should assume that all of my sisters can hear. That’s how you should talk to me. I don’t take it back. That’s how it’s going to be. So watch it."

So anyway, there’s like some times when I talk about it, and it became into this episode where I get hit with a Frisbee in the neck, and it becomes my obsession. Actually, I think it’s the second episode, if you were sent it. It turns out that, oh yeah, I have to be looking up and not anticipating a Frisbee is about to be thrown into my neck. My biggest fear. It’s mean, it’s not … with dolphins, or whatever that was.

And just in terms of acting? This is really corny, but I try to—as corny, or as absurd, or as aggressively … stupid something is, I know that I try to play it real, because without that contrast, if I was acting like, "Whew, I’m crazy," there would be no contrast to how stupid the material is. I am kind of aware of that