The GIANT rundown on scene-stealer Aziz Ansari
In just a few short years, Aziz Ansari has gone from being an NYU Stern School of Business grad to a rising comedy star. After starting out on the stand-up circuit, the 26-year-old Indian-American comic co-founded the cult MTV series Human Giant, which led to memorable roles in movies like Observe and Report and the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, which just wrapped its first season and will return to the network’s Thursday night line-up in the fall. His upcoming turn in Judd Apatow’s new comedy Funny People (starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen) due out July 31, confirms that this scene-stealer is here to stay.
Ansari is a Twitter addict.
I used to have a blog, but it was hard to keep up with when we were filming, so I started Tweeting. I read Diddy’s Tweets and thought they were so entertaining, I mainly wanted to follow what he was doing. It was easy and quick and I really got into it. Twitter is an interesting idea to me to send whatever dumb idea I have in my head to 17,000 people.
For example…
For a couple of days, I Tweeted like I was on The Wire. I pretended that I was sending messages to characters in the show or that I was going to [the fictional strip club] Orlando’s. You can’t do stuff like that in your standup routines, because not everyone knows The Wire but on Twitter if you know the Wire you’re into it and if not you can ignore it. It’s an interesting way to do dumb jokes or niche jokes.
He draws his comic inspiration from real life.
I take things that I’m into and throw them into my characters. [The fast food chain] Chick-fil-A is something I’m really into in real life, so I worked that into my character in Observe and Report. And I’m really into Lost and I Am King Cologne, so my character on Parks will probably be into those things too. I try to mold the character so that it plays to my strengths. If the character knows what I know or is into the things I’m into I’ll be able to do that character better. If my character was really into baseball, I wouldn’t know what to say or do because I don’t know much about baseball. If he’s into The Wire, I’ll be fine.
But he’s not into playing stereotypes.
I’ve turned down plenty of roles where it’s like, “You’re the guy with a thick Indian accent that drives the cab.” I’m like “Nope, not interested.” Everything I’ve done, I’m not playing up ethnic jokes.
Ansari takes a walk on the raunchy side in Funny People.
I play Randy, the vulgar comic that other comedians hate, but audiences go nuts over because he plays to the lowest common denominator. He dances around and does this material about getting his dick sucked all the time. I asked Judd if I could do a documentary about that character for the DVD so we’re shooting that right now. It gets into who this guy is and what his world is. It’ll be like a 30 minute doc—I did so much standup for the movie but only a small chunk will be in there so this will have a lot of that stuff that doesn’t get in.
He’s a disciple of Chris Rock.
When I first started doing stand-up, he was the person that I most wanted to be as a comedian. I know his HBO specials by heart. As I started doing stand-up more, I discovered guys like Patton Oswalt and they became huge influences. Those guys are my peers and you see them a lot more than the super famous guys.
Trader Joe’s is his second home.
I don’t have good phone reception at my house, so whenever I do interviews I walk to Trader Joe’s and eat free samples. I just tried some turkey with apple cranberry chutney—it’s very good. I’m going to do a couple laps around the store and come back for seconds without her noticing I’m the same person who had one earlier.
His culinary tastes aren’t limited to TJ’s.
I’m really into food and I try to keep an open mind. I usually like going out to eat. I’m a big taco buff, probably because they’re so quick and tasty. And LA has so many good taco places. Right now I’m going to get some TJ’s chicken sausage ravioli. It looks pretty good. I’m not a chef by the way—I just by Trader Joe’s stuff and cook it.
Ansari wants you to know that Human Giant isn’t canceled, just on hiatus.
People are always like “It’s a bummer they canceled your show.” And I’m like “No, they didn’t cancel it!” MTV left the door open for us to do another special or something like that. Right now there’s no official plan, but you never know. It’s hard to work with all our schedules. But I’d be psyched to do something with them again.
He’s on a first-name basis with Kanye West.
It’s crazy, because I’m a huge fan of his. I was really psyched when he came to my show. I feel weird just talking about it!
Read more about Aziz Ansari in GIANT’s July issue, on stands now.
