He is the hottest new standup in America. Judd Apatow is his biggest fan and Kanye West is his best friend. Hadley Freeman meets trailblazer Aziz Ansari
There is a very funny and surprisingly sweet moment in the regular standup routine of Aziz Ansari, easily America's fastest-rising comedian. Actually, all of Ansari's routines could be described as "very funny and surprisingly sweet", but this one is particularly so, and it is one he obviously enjoys as he does it often, refining it each time:
"I was doing an interview once and the guy said, you must be psyched by all this Slumdog Millionaire stuff. And I was like, umm... Yeah! I am! I have no idea why, though, as I had NOTHING to do with that movie! It's just that some people who kinda look like me are in it, and everyone loved it and it won some Oscars and stuff. And then I was like, whoa whoa whoa ? are white people just psyched ALL THE TIME? It's like, Back to the Future ? that's us! Godfather ? that's us! Jaws ? that's us! Every fucking movie BUT Slumdog Millionaire and Boyz n the Hood is us!"
Ansari often satirises people's expectations of him based on his ethnicity, and the fact that he tells these stories with the light southern accent that comes from having grown up in South Carolina makes them funnier. But it's the way he tells them that gives them that extra comic twist, devoid of the anger or bitterness that is so common in standups and would certainly be understandable from Ansari when relating yet another story about how some dude couldn't quite compute that, while Ansari might have brown skin, he doesn't talk like Apu from The Simpsons. Instead, he is all wide-eyed enthusiasm, happily turning such expectations into childlike flights of fancy. Last year, when Ansari hosted the MTV awards, he appeared in a sketch playing "swagga coach" to fellow standup Zach Galifianakis, who apparently believed that any brown person could up his cool cred. Unfortunately for Galifianakis's character, Ansari's swagga coach was more N-Dubz than Jay-Z: "When you have swag, you live by certain rules," he said, from behind his plastic sunglasses and beneath his fitted cap. "One rule I have is I only sit on things that are purple. I can only go to two movie theatres."
Ansari has a lot to be about enthusiastic about these days. He is currently enjoying the kind of success that most standup comedians can't even imagine, even if they had half the imagination Ansari does. He is about to embark on a world tour, which reaches the UK next week; he has sold three movie ideas to that benevolent godfather to all young comedians, Judd Apatow; he's just wrapped up his first starring role in a film, 30 Minutes or Less, appearing opposite Jesse Eisenberg ("It's basically Heat, but with me and Jesse," Ansari deadpans); and he's on one of the most critically acclaimed American sitcoms, Parks and Recreation, made by the people behind The Office: an American Workplace and now in its third series.
He has also already achieved two of the greatest goals one can attain in America's entertainment and culture worlds: last month, he played New York's Carnegie Hall, and in November he was profiled in the most august of American magazines, the New Yorker. In typical style, the magazine said that the secret to Ansari's success is his "counterintuitive ability to observe ridicule and react not with simple mockery or exasperation . . . but with half-crazed wonder".
Well, on stage, anyway. In person, Ansari is more guarded than one might expect from someone whose routine regularly includes an extended imitation of R Kelly. Instead of any half-crazed wonder, when Ansari walks into the lobby of New York's Bowery hotel, he looks slight and almost fragile, practically hiding behind his carton of coconut water. The only time he relaxes is when he talks about his standup, as opposed to himself.
"I guess my personality is that I get excited on stage," he says quietly. After all, he points out, "those angry comedians aren't really angry, either".
Ansari grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina ? his parents emigrated there from India. One of his most oft-quoted routines is about immigrants who make the slightly offbeat decision to move to America's southern states: "It's kind of like a girl going, 'Yeah, you can see me naked. But you can only look at my left elbow. And my left elbow is racist.'"
But Ansari stresses that it wasn't like he was growing up in To Kill a Mockingbird: "I think people have an exaggerated idea of what it was like down there," he says. "It wasn't all peaches and cream, but, you know, kids are mean and they'll pick on differences. So if you're the only minority kid in an all-white school, that's a difference but no one ever threw rocks at me or anything like that. Really, it was about as bad as being a fat kid."
As well as being the only Indian-American, he was also the youngest in his class, as he skipped a grade. But that, he insists, worked to his advantage: "Kids thought that was cool as they were like, whoa, this little brown kid? He's really smart! I was already way smaller than most kids [in my year] anyway. Kids in the south are way big."
'Oh, he's Indian!'
He never had any thoughts of being a comedian or actor when he was a kid because "when you grow up in a small town, the world you see on TV is over there, and you're here, and you never imagine you'll cross it". But when he moved to New York to go to college, he started doing standup, and by his second year he was thinking that he could translate it into a career. He made the successful TV sketch show, Human Giant, with some friends from the comedy circuit; that led to him being cast as the scene-stealing Randy in Apatow's Funny People, and, eventually, hanging out with his new BFF, Kanye West.
With their similar sense of enthusiasm and boyish fascination with pop culture, West and Ansari are clearly kindred spirits: many of Ansari's funniest routines involve the high-energy singer, such as the one about the way West responds to text messages "before I even press send".
Although Ansari has never made his ethnicity a central part of his routines ("I'm not interested in stereotypes and all that ? I just talk about a guy in his 20s and what's going on in his life"), he has always played on outsider's views of him. He often enacts people's reactions when they ask him where he's from and he says, quite simply and truthfully, "South Carolina".
But he seems increasingly wary of being reduced to "Aziz Ansari, the Indian comedian" as opposed to "Aziz Ansari, comedian", or maybe he's just tired of correcting people's assumptions. "That whole thing about people thinking I'd be excited about Slumdog Millionaire ? well, I don't think it's a racist thing but I do think it's interesting. It's like when Indian people come to my show and they're like, oh, he's Indian! Let's check out his comedy! That's weird to me, I don't do that," he says, sounding a little frustrated.
At another point, when I ask how his parents reacted to him deciding to become a comedian, he says they would have been unhappy if he'd dropped out of school, "but not because they're Indian or anything". Of course not ? because they're parents, I say, surprised at the idea that anyone might think only Indian parents are concerned about their children's education.
"Right, exactly," he says, in the relieved tone of someone who is used to dealing with people who assume his father dresses like Gandhi.
And so far, Ansari has deftly avoided any ethnic stereotyping. None of his acting roles have depended on him being Indian ? they just depended on him being funny, which he is ? very. So is he having as much fun in life as he looks like he's having on stage? He reluctantly makes a small smile, "Yeah I guess so. I'm pretty happy."
? Aziz Ansari plays the Soho theatre, London W1, 24-28 February. Details: 020-7478 0100.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/feb/16/aziz-ansari
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