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 MANDVIPeople 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.
More Aasif Mandvi Quotes
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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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I was a fan of “The Daily Show” I watched it,I never imagined being on it, but I figured I would just go down there and do my best Stephen Colbert impression.
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I was born in India – but never really lived there.
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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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If people invited Muslims into their home every week by way of a TV show would go a long way to making people feel comfortable with Muslims and countering misconceptions about who we are. Plus, of course, that will make it easier for us to impose sharia law across America.
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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.
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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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When you’re brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.
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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.
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North Carolina precinct chairman and GOP executive committee member Don Yelton thinks his state’s new voting restrictions are just fine.
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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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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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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!
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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 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