Aisha Tyler on Archer, standup comedy, and being Aisha Tyler

I Think You're Interesting

Does Aisha Tyler sleep? That’s a question you might reasonably ask after looking at her IMDb page for a moment or two. She’s a regular on two TV shows — FXX’s Archer and CBS’s Criminal Minds — while also hosting Unapologetic, a new talk show for AMC. And that’s in addition to all the other one-off hosting gigs she takes on. And yet she’s always fresh, funny, and on point. Tyler got her start as a standup comic in the late '90s, at a time when, she says, black women were often pigeonholed into a certain style of comedy while she was much more comfortable making jokes about her love of all things geeky. She followed that up with a hosting gig on Talk Soup, and from there, her career took off and continues to fly high. So Aisha joins Todd in the studio this week to talk about her career, her time in standup comedy, and playing Lana Kane on Archer for nine whole seasons. It’s the longest she’s played a single character, she says — unless you count all that time she spent playing Aisha Tyler. And after this interview, we think maybe we do.

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