Nosheen Iqbal interviews Aziz Ansari: ‘I’ve always been a feminist. There wasn’t a period when I was against women and then started dating one’
You can count on two hands the number of comedians who have
sold out Madison Square Garden. Eddie Murphy is one. George Carlin is another.
Last October, Aziz Ansari did it twice in a single night, performing his fourth
standup special in four years to 40,000 people. Five years ago, Ansari was the
hipster’s comedian-in-chief; his material skewered pop culture and was built on anecdotes about
celebrity parties and the daily absurdities of his own life. Now, Ansari
has emerged as one of the most original voices on the circuit, a social
chronicler of his age talking about immigration, factory-farming and
relationships. He has crossed into the mainstream with his credibility intact.
To TV audiences, he is probably best-known for playing
scene-stealing, smooth-talking, woman-repellent government worker Tom Haverford in Parks and Recreation – a part written for
him. (Sample line: “Yes, I’m married. But my wife understands that a good
politician has to be appealing to the ladies. The fact that I haven’t even
gotten close to cheating on her is a disappointment to us both.”) The show,
created in 2009 by the team behind the US remake of The Office, was a critical
hit in the States until it wrapped after six years last February; in
time-honoured British broadcasting tradition, it was farted out haphazardly at
odd times and random days for three seasons before coming off air.
But it’s in his standup specials that he has picked up most
of his fans: by and large, left-leaning city-living millennials whose lives and
neuroses are refracted by this second-generation Tamil Indian American who grew
up in a town of 8,000 people in South Carolina. (“I’m always psyched when I see
older people in the audience,” he says. “If I see people that look like us,
young people of every race and ethnicity, that doesn’t surprise me.”)
Now, he’s written a book for those fans. Unlike the
sortabiographies of his peers, or the cash-in Christmas toilet books so big
with British comedians, Ansari has gone academic: having talked about the
dating game at length in his standup, he scored a $3.5m book deal in 2012 and,
over the course of 18 months, interviewed thousands of people from all over the
US while he toured his shows. Still curious to find out how love and sexuality
operate across cultures, he workshopped the book’s themes with focus groups in
Tokyo, Paris, South America and the UAE. The result, Modern Romance, written
with sociologist Eric Klinenberg, is published in the UK next week by Allen
Lane.
We meet today in the courtyard of Robert De Niro’s New York
hotel. “I had to go to a friend’s wedding, I just got back today,” he says.
“After this I’m gonna go see Mad Max, so this is a little hour of work and then
I’ll see a movie and have a rest.” It’s small talk deployed as a subtle power
move; a sneaky way to set the tone for brisk efficiency.
Ansari’s energy onstage is huge: boggle-eyed and
fast-talking, every joke and routine is rattled out in a buzzy Southern twang
that has a nasal cadence elasticated and amplified by several notches when he’s
performing. Real-life Aziz is far more quiet and closed off. Dressed
preppy-casual style in a navy blazer, striped polo and khakis, he cups his ear
and leans forward when I speak, then often sits back and offers polite, but
clipped responses.
Occasionally, he clucks: a teeth-kissing Ansari-ism that he
uses, I think, when he’s humouring a question he’s already bored by. Take this,
on his formative years, as a way to explain how he graduated from NYU in 2004
and landed his first lauded show – Human Giant –
on MTV, within a year: “There was no theatre department, nothing to foster that
interest in my town.” He wasn’t ambitious. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be
but I remember a specific moment, as a kid, thinking: ‘Every adult has a job.
What am I going to be?’ And nothing appealed.” He says he enjoyed public
speaking – “I don’t know, I enjoyed making people laugh. Which is a bozo
answer” – and was curious and clever in school. “People think I’m reserved but
I would hate to interview someone like that where the person is AHAHAHA, all
the time,” he says. “It would be insufferable.”
Ansari’s prolific career is probably best viewed in two
halves, with the first two recorded sets (2010’s Sensual Moments for an
Intimate Evening and 2012’s Dangerously Delicious) all about the goofy sketch
comedian, brash and wide-eyed about hanging out with Kanye and Jay Z, meeting women
in bars or his fat little cousin Harris. The latter two – 2013’s Buried Alive
and this year’s Live at Madison Square Garden – are more thoughtful, built
around themes rather than scattergun comedy bits. Now he does topical riffs on
the way humans deal with one another, how technology enabled Ansari’s
generation “to be the rudest, flakiest people ever” and how it changed sex and
relationships more dramatically and quickly than any time before it… read more:
