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 MANDVII 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.
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.
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’ve always said I’m the worst representative of Muslim-Americans that’s ever existed, because I’ve been inside more bars than mosques.
AASIF MANDVI -
So I had this completely unrealistic idea of what America was — but I wanted to be there.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
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 -
I’m not really a food connoisseur.
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 -
Of course the law’s not racist.
AASIF MANDVI -
England has an interesting relationship with the Indian subcontinent because the years of colonization and the history between the two places.
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 -
It’s an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.
AASIF MANDVI -
I said we are Ghodratis and there’s nothing that Ghodratis like more than a bargain.
AASIF MANDVI -
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.
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