I grew up on American pop culture so everything that I fantasized about to get out of this sort of humdrum world of Bradford was about America. So when we decided to move there I was on the plane.
AASIF MANDVIComedy 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.
More Aasif Mandvi Quotes
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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’m Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off.
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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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England has an interesting relationship with the Indian subcontinent because the years of colonization and the history between the two places.
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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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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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I said we are Ghodratis and there’s nothing that Ghodratis like more than a bargain.
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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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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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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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Indian culture is essentially much more of a we culture. It’s a communal culture where you do what’s best for the community – you procreate.
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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?
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I think politicians and comedians have a lot in common. One is a group of approval-seeking narcissists who will say and do anything to be liked… and comedians are always talking about politics.
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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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