Demetri Martin ’95 once put on a gorilla suit and ran hooting around Spring Fling. Now he gets paid to make jokes and cartoons. The New Haven Advocate recently profiled Martin, revealing a little bit about what he was like as a Yale undergrad.

“When I arrived [at Yale], I dove in headfirst,” he told the Advocate. “I had Yale t-shirts, the little Yale banner for my wall.” His Yale classmates, unlike the ones at his high school, did not “marginalize” him as a nerd, despite his habit of creating crossword puzzles and palindromes in his free time. He has written a 224-word poem palindrome, and it is comprehensible.

Martin is currently on tour and will be stopping by the Elm City later this week. A movie script that features Martin as its start is in the works at Paramount Studios. His book, This Is a Book, is coming out on April 25.

As for the gorilla suit, Martin cites it as an early indicator of his comedic fate.

“There were signs that I should have been a comedian,” he told the Yale Daily News in 2003. “I was acting out and starved for attention. Case in point — the gorilla suit.”

Martin will be performing at the Schubert Theater at 8 p.m. on Friday.