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.
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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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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I thought [when I was 16] my days were just going to be spent hanging out on a beach and my girlfriend was going to be Miss Teen USA and my best friend will be a dolphin.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Voter fraud does just barely exist, while racism, according to the Supreme Court, is a thing of the past.
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Because to Americans, Chechnya might as well be a suburb of Narnia.
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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.
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Re-colonizing it and sort of reverse-colonizing it to the point that today the national dish of Great Britain is Chicken Tikka Masala.
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I think family dynamics are definitely very interesting. And in my case my sister did get married. She gave my parents a grandchild.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I don’t want to tell people what they should think.
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I was born in India – but never really lived there.
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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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In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism – this idea of my own personal fulfillment.
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So I had this completely unrealistic idea of what America was — but I wanted to be there.
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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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You can get samosas in any pub in England today, pretty much. So, “Gunga Din” has come back.
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I know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.
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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.
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Paki- bashing was kind of this term that was used in general to beat up anyone that was from the Indian subcontinent.
AASIF MANDVI