In the most personal and serious passage of his speech, Azaria dropped the comedy voices and spoke directly about what he had learned as both an actor and a person. He confessed that for years he had believed 'who I was and how I thought and how I felt was inherently uninteresting and flawed.' As a mimic and voice actor, he had built a career out of being other people — 'anybody but myself.' The breakthrough came when he realized that great actors, even great character actors, succeed not by hiding behind characters but by being willing to 'utterly be themselves' on camera or on stage. The same principle applied to life beyond acting: your authentic emotional responses — not what you think you should feel, but what you actually feel — are your most reliable compass. He closed by letting his Simpsons characters each give advice, ending with Agador Spartacus from The Birdcage: 'Just please be yourselves. And if you can't be yourself, please be Judy Garland from that movie Meet Me in St. Louis.' Even the joke reinforced the message — be yourself, and if that fails, at least be someone fabulous.