“England has an interesting relationship with the Indian subcontinent because the years of colonization and the history between the two places.”

For anybody who’s ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.

In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food… they’ve never even tasted it!

I was born in India – but never really lived there.

If you choose to be a Muslim then you believe that it is on some level wrong to show the image of the Prophet Muhammad.

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.

Getting chased home from the bus stop after school by English kids, boarding school, being targeted for praying to what they call Allah wallah ding dong.

I think Islam has been hijacked by the idea that all Muslims are terrorists; that Islam is about hate, about war, about jihad

I think I discovered my first, you know, my first image of a naked woman was sort of sneaking a peek at one of those magazines that was in my dad’s store.

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.

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.

In Britain, you never get away from the fact that you’re a foreigner. In the U.S., the view is it doesn’t matter where you come from.

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.

Now the bigots have to get creative. Good luck coming up with slurs for Chechens. Go back where you came from, Ushanka head.

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.

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.

Voter fraud does just barely exist, while racism, according to the Supreme Court, is a thing of the past.