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 MANDVII think Islam has been hijacked by the idea that all Muslims are terrorists; that Islam is about hate, about war, about jihad
More Aasif Mandvi Quotes
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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 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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I’m not really a food connoisseur.
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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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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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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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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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You can get samosas in any pub in England today, pretty much. So, “Gunga Din” has come back.
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I was born in India – but never really lived there.
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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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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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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.
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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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I think that hijacks the spirituality and beauty that exists within Islam. I believe in allowing Islam to be seen in context and in its entirety and being judged on what it really is, not what you think it is.
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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?
AASIF MANDVI