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 MANDVIThe 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.
More Aasif Mandvi Quotes
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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?
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If you choose to be a Muslim then you believe that it is on some level wrong to show the image of the Prophet Muhammad.
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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 know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.
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I don’t want to tell people what they should think.
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Bradford specifically there were a lot of Pakistanis there. Even today it has a very large Pakistani population.It was something that I experienced
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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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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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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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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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For anybody who’s ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.
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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 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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It’s an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.
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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