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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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