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?
AASIF MANDVIYou 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?
More Aasif Mandvi Quotes
-
-
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 MANDVI -
Of course the law’s not racist.
AASIF MANDVI -
If you don’t acknowledge differences, it’s as bad as stereotyping or reducing someone.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
I’m Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off.
AASIF MANDVI -
It’s an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.
AASIF MANDVI -
I don’t want to tell people what they should think.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
Now the bigots have to get creative. Good luck coming up with slurs for Chechens. Go back where you came from, Ushanka head.
AASIF MANDVI -
I think Islam has been hijacked by the idea that all Muslims are terrorists; that Islam is about hate, about war, about jihad
AASIF MANDVI -
When you’re brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.
AASIF MANDVI -
Samantha Bee said to me when I first started on the “Daily Show”, she was like no – there is no – the only way you’ll learn this job is by doing this job.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
Paki- bashing was kind of this term that was used in general to beat up anyone that was from the Indian subcontinent.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
It is ironic that it doesn’t matter how successful I am in any other capacity. Ultimately, my parents marker is do you have a wife? And do you have children?
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
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 MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI -
Bradford specifically there were a lot of Pakistanis there. Even today it has a very large Pakistani population.It was something that I experienced
AASIF MANDVI -
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!
AASIF MANDVI -
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?
AASIF MANDVI -
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!
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
AASIF MANDVI