Phoebe Robinson is only 27, yet she has already managed to make a name for herself in the upbeat area of stand-up comedy. TimesSquare.com had the chance of chatting with her.

TimesSquare.com: What made you laugh while growing up?

Phoebe Robinson: What made me laugh a lot growing up was physical comedy, which is nothing like what I do in stand up. Ha. But I was really into the "Three Stooges", "Three's Company", and "I Love Lucy." Anything that involved someone tripping really cracked me! I also loved "Sanford & Son", I would watch the reruns on TV, even though there wasn't a lot of physical comedy in it.

TS: When did you decide to materialize your ability of making people laugh into a career?

PR: I think I've always been a funny person – not a class clown, but pretty good at making sarcastic comments. I came to be a stand-up comedian in a sort of roundabout way. I did improv in college, at the Pratt Institute, for about two years. When I graduated, I got a day job at a film company, so I stopped performing, focusing more on film. After all, that was the reason I had moved to NYC on my own, I thought I would love working in the film industry, become a producer and a screenwriter, and win a bunch of Oscars. Haha! I liked film, and I worked at quite a few companies around the city. The last job I had in the field made me realize I was really, really, miserable. I decided to get back into improv, and took a class at UCB. I liked it a lot, but I couldn't afford to take all their classes, so I thought "Oh well, there goes that!" A few months later, a friend of mine decided to take a stand up class at Caroline's, and asked me to join her. I thought to myself "That's so dumb, I don't want to do stand up at all!" Anyways, I decided to indulge her. The moment my hand hit the microphone, that was it, I loved stand-up. Basically, this story says that I know nothing about myself. Haha!

TS: Where do you get your inspiration and what is your writing process like?

PR: I guess my comedy falls under the generic umbrella of "observational," so I just write about things I see, things that happen to me, etc. Quite a bit of my inspiration comes from chatting with different people. I'll just be fooling around or ranting about something and making myself or the person I'm writing with laugh and I think, "Maybe this could be a bit." Sometimes they aren't, but sometimes they can be. So it's a crapshoot.

So I would say that 50% of my writing process is born out of conversations I have with people, so I'll copy and paste the document into a Word document and see what parts of what I wrote could possibly work in a joke and then I go from there. The other 50% of my writing process involves me procrastinating and doing anything other than writing. Haha. I'll do laundry, run errands, catch up on things on my DVR, etc., all so I can avoid looking at a blank page and having to write anything. And then after a while, I just buckle down and get to work and then I have fun. Ha. I know writing is fun, but getting started is the hardest part, so I put off the writing because I know it means getting through the toughest part first. Not the most productive writing process, but it's been working for me thus far, so I'm going to stick with it.

TS: You sometimes touch upon controversial subjects. How do you and the people around you deal with it? How do you deal with the controversy, and how is this controversy perceived by others?

PR: As far as controversial topics - race, gay marriage, etc - go, I just write about things that are on my mind and what I care about, so to me, they're not controversial. I just want to explore things that I think about on a regular basis. I think that with controversial topics, if you will, if the audience knows where you are coming from, they won't react in a super negative way most of the time. Like when I talk about race, I'm not going "All White people are evil!" That's never the angle I'm going for. However, I may come at it like, "American Girl finally has a Black doll and it's a recently freed slave and the main accessory that comes with a doll is an ice cream maker. That's ridiculous to me because that's not what "Roots" was about, BUT being an ice cream maker is like the best job ever."

So I'm poking fun at the ludicrous of a toy company trying to address the issue of slavery, but they can't address it in a real way because you don't want to bum kids out, so American Girl is like, "Look, kids, ice cream. Yay! Oh good, the kids fell for that because things are about to get really awkward." So I think I like to address controversial things in way by pointing out that if people weren't awkward about supposed controversial topics, then they would perhaps be less controversial. It's good to talk about this stuff and if we can laugh about it at the same time, then I'm doing my job. And luckily, so far, I haven't had really any drama with what I have said about these topics. If the audience likes you and you're funny, you can pretty much get away with almost anything.

TS: Your show has recently been added to the TV Guide's "100 Shows to see before you Die". What is it about you that we should know before we die?

PR: What you should know about me before I die - actually, you shouldn't know this at all - is that I used to have the biggest crush on Ricky Martin. I had his CDs, calendar, and would watch him whenever he was on TV. So when I was in high school, I had this dream that someone would write a letter to Oprah about how much Ricky Martin liked me and that he would surprise me and show up to my school and serenade me in the cafeteria in front of everyone. Yeah, that was a legitimate dream until the day I got my diploma in my hand. Even when I was in the audience listening to the guest speaker, I'm like, "Ricky still has like 5 mins left where he can jump out of the bushes and sing 'She Bangs.'" Nice.

Phoebe Robinson plays Carolines on Sunday, August 19th at 10pm. For more information and tickets, please go to http://www.carolines.com/comedian/phoebe-robinson/

For more Times Square articles like Phoebe Robinson: Newly Hatched, please visit the Stage Interviews Section of TimesSquare.com