When I was 11 my friend’s mom made a peanut butter sandwich. I ate the sandwich and was like, ‘I’m never eating anything else again.’ And I still eat peanut butter every day. I would put peanut butter on a steak.
AASIF MANDVII’ve always said I’m the worst representative of Muslim-Americans that’s ever existed, because I’ve been inside more bars than mosques.
More Aasif Mandvi Quotes
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The great joy of doing ‘The Daily Show’ for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I’m playing the brown guy, and sometimes I’m not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.
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Voter fraud does just barely exist, while racism, according to the Supreme Court, is a thing of the past.
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I was born in India – but never really lived there.
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I think you had the GOP down there in North Carolina reaching out to African-American voters and this guy coming on television and using the N-word and saying what Don Yelton said.
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If you don’t acknowledge differences, it’s as bad as stereotyping or reducing someone.
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Now the bigots have to get creative. Good luck coming up with slurs for Chechens. Go back where you came from, Ushanka head.
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Comedy can reach many more people than, say, a serious lecture on the topic. And comedy might just be the access point to reach people who want to be entertained and also learn something.
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People lament that there’s no roles being written for South Asian or Muslim characters. But their parents don’t want their children to go into the entertainment field. You don’t get it both ways.
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The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.
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The experience of being on a show that is very much in the center of popular culture is exciting. You really feel like you’re reaching people.
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I think that hijacks the spirituality and beauty that exists within Islam. I believe in allowing Islam to be seen in context and in its entirety and being judged on what it really is, not what you think it is.
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You can get samosas in any pub in England today, pretty much. So, “Gunga Din” has come back.
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When my family decided to leave England I could not have been happier. I was sort of like – America seemed like the land of opportunity and, you know, it was Hollywood to me.
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I said we are Ghodratis and there’s nothing that Ghodratis like more than a bargain.
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I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it’s been something that I’ve always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
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I think Islam has been hijacked by the idea that all Muslims are terrorists; that Islam is about hate, about war, about jihad
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When you’re brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.
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Traditional television as we have known it will make love to the Internet and have a child. That child will be the future. It’s already happening, and it’s hot!
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The idea that I had anything to do with speaking about Islam or about the Muslim world was just absurd to my family. … I hadn’t been to the mosque in like 10 years.
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It’s an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.
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From my parent’s generation the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love. It was a partnership. It’s about creating family. It’s about creating offspring.
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An artist’s job is simply to take the mirror in front of your face and hold it there. It’s not to give you any answers. It is simply to take that mirror and point it at you.
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I think family dynamics are definitely very interesting. And in my case my sister did get married. She gave my parents a grandchild.
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I mean, but obviously, in people’s eyes, it still – it can still link Islam to terrorism. I mean, why does it make a difference that they’re white?
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This was in the ’70s and there was a lot of racism towards South Asians and there was a lot of hazing and bullying and racism that really probably shaped me in some way in terms of, like, wanting to get out of there.
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We are Muslims. My father would pawn off his Muslim in-laws as Hindus just so that he could get free pancakes.
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