“So I had this completely unrealistic idea of what America was — but I wanted to be there.”

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.

I think family dynamics are definitely very interesting. And in my case my sister did get married. She gave my parents a grandchild.

I don’t want to tell people what they should think.

You do find a lot of your time in the West kind of searching for your place in the world – your voice, your identity, like, who am I? Like, what is my reason for being here, you know? And in that same way who am I to be partnered with, you know?

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.

Of course the law’s not racist.

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.

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

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.

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.

Country music belongs to America.

Jazz is America’s classical music.

We really are All One….this is the very philosophy that has kept me virtually anonymous in America for fifteen years.

I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.

There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition.

I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.

If you say ‘Good Morning’ in America and it’s five past twelve you end up with a lawsuit.

I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient – in America.