On an unseasonably warm winter day, Ben Roy is jogging through City Park. Dressed in running sneakers and a black hoodie that covers a galaxy of chest and arm tattoos, he passes a Latino family pushing strollers loaded with children, a yuppie couple walking a Labrador, an elderly loner trying to feed the geese.A few paces behind, red-faced and out of breath, a journalist holds a microphone into the air, attempting to capture the comedian’s rapid-fire responses.

“We’re all flawed in design, in that our intellect is a slave to our emotion,” Roy says with a slight East Coast accent. “We feel something, and our intellect rationalizes it. So if something feels wrong but we want to keep doing it, we use our intellect to justify it. Being an addict feels wrong, but we can rationalize all sorts of reasons why we’re not an addict.”