Aziz Ansari: 'I've Always Been a Feminist'

By Nosheen Iqbal, Guardian UK

08 June 15

He’s gone from cult star of Parks and Recreation to the fastest-rising standup on America’s comedy circuit, confronting racism, douchebags and love in the 21st century – the subject of his new book Modern Romance

ou can count on two hands the number of comedians who have sold out Madison Square Garden. Eddie Murphy is one. George Carlin is another. Last October, Aziz Ansari did it twice in a single night, performing his fourth standup special in four years to 40,000 people. Five years ago, Ansari was the hipster’s comedian-in-chief; his material skewered pop culture and was built on anecdotes about celebrity parties and the daily absurdities of his own life. Now, Ansari has emerged as one of the most original voices on the circuit, a social chronicler of his age talking about immigration, factory-farming and relationships. He has crossed into the mainstream with his credibility intact.

To TV audiences, he is probably best-known for playing scene-stealing, smooth-talking, woman-repellent government worker Tom Haverford in Parks and Recreation – a part written for him. (Sample line: “Yes, I’m married. But my wife understands that a good politician has to be appealing to the ladies. The fact that I haven’t even gotten close to cheating on her is a disappointment to us both.”) The show, created in 2009 by the team behind the US remake of The Office, was a critical hit in the States until it wrapped after six years last February; in time-honoured British broadcasting tradition, it was farted out haphazardly at odd times and random days for three seasons before coming off air.

But it’s in his standup specials that he has picked up most of his fans: by and large, left-leaning city-living millennials whose lives and neuroses are refracted by this second-generation Tamil Indian American who grew up in a town of 8,000 people in South Carolina. (“I’m always psyched when I see older people in the audience,” he says. “If I see people that look like us, young people of every race and ethnicity, that doesn’t surprise me.”)

Now, he’s written a book for those fans. Unlike the sortabiographies of his peers, or the cash-in Christmas toilet books so big with British comedians, Ansari has gone academic: having talked about the dating game at length in his standup, he scored a $3.5m book deal in 2012 and, over the course of 18 months, interviewed thousands of people from all over the US while he toured his shows. Still curious to find out how love and sexuality operate across cultures, he workshopped the book’s themes with focus groups in Tokyo, Paris, South America and the UAE. The result, Modern Romance, written with sociologist Eric Klinenberg, is published in the UK next week by Allen Lane.

We meet today in the courtyard of Robert De Niro’s New York hotel. “I had to go to a friend’s wedding, I just got back today,” he says. “After this I’m gonna go see Mad Max, so this is a little hour of work and then I’ll see a movie and have a rest.” It’s small talk deployed as a subtle power move; a sneaky way to set the tone for brisk efficiency.

Ansari’s energy onstage is huge: boggle-eyed and fast-talking, every joke and routine is rattled out in a buzzy Southern twang that has a nasal cadence elasticated and amplified by several notches when he’s performing. Real-life Aziz is far more quiet and closed off. Dressed preppy-casual style in a navy blazer, striped polo and khakis, he cups his ear and leans forward when I speak, then often sits back and offers polite, but clipped responses. Occasionally, he clucks: a teeth-kissing Ansari-ism that he uses, I think, when he’s humouring a question he’s already bored by. Take this, on his formative years, as a way to explain how he graduated from NYU in 2004 and landed his first lauded show – Human Giant – on MTV, within a year: “There was no theatre department, nothing to foster that interest in my town.” He wasn’t ambitious. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be but I remember a specific moment, as a kid, thinking: ‘Every adult has a job. What am I going to be?’ And nothing appealed.” He says he enjoyed public speaking – “I don’t know, I enjoyed making people laugh. Which is a bozo answer” – and was curious and clever in school. “People think I’m reserved but I would hate to interview someone like that where the person is AHAHAHA, all the time,” he says. “It would be insufferable.”

Ansari’s prolific career is probably best viewed in two halves, with the first two recorded sets (2010’s Sensual Moments for an Intimate Evening and 2012’s Dangerously Delicious) all about the goofy sketch comedian, brash and wide-eyed about hanging out with Kanye and Jay Z, meeting women in bars or his fat little cousin Harris. The latter two – 2013’s Buried Alive and this year’s Live at Madison Square Garden – are more thoughtful, built around themes rather than scattergun comedy bits. Now he does topical riffs on the way humans deal with one another, how technology enabled Ansari’s generation “to be the rudest, flakiest people ever” and how it changed sex and relationships more dramatically and quickly than any time before it.

“Does every generation look at the younger one and think, ‘They’re just idiots’?” he asks, rhetorically. “Is there a real shift, or is it a case of people looking back at it? I would say I was a nice guy 10 years ago but I am definitely a much more evolved person just from growing older.”

Ansari confronts America’s racism, politics, fear of feminism and gay rights more now than he did at the start of his career. Earlier this year he joked on Letterman about the US needing “a brown Al Sharpton” in a time when Rupert Murdoch can hatefully tweet about Muslims and the “growing jihadist cancer” they’re all responsible for. Ansari, who isn’t remotely religious (“I grew up in South Carolina, there was never a religious community so it was never a big thing for me”), tweeted back at Murdoch: “Rups, can we get a step-by-step guide? How can my 60-year-old parents in NC help destroy terrorist groups? Plz advise.” He kept going until the press coverage piled up and Murdoch apologised.

“It was fascinating to me that no one had said anything apart from JK Rowling. I was, like, ‘What? Why?’ If you were going against [Murdoch] you clearly had ample ground because he clearly said an awful racist thing.”

Would his edge become neutered if his celebrity got much bigger? “I don’t have any fear of being whitewashed because to get really exciting stuff, you usually have to write it yourself,” he says. “The stuff other people get excited about probably gets given to Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. A lot of people would have had to say no, before they got to Aziz on that list.”

Plus, he says, of all the things he’s talked about in public, discussing feminism, again on Letterman last year, got him the most overwhelmingly positive response. “Some people wrote: ‘Er, Aziz’s girlfriend turned him into a feminist,’ and that’s not true, I’ve been a feminist my whole life. There wasn’t a period where I was really against women and then started dating one and was like, ‘You know what? Men and women are equal.’ That definitely didn’t happen.” What prompted him to talk about it? “It’s interesting, you see interviews with female celebrities and they’re very scared of that word. It’s such an easy concept to get behind and a big part of it is that people don’t really know what it’s essentially promoting.”

Ansari’s blog – azizisbored.tumblr.com – and his friends confirm that he is endlessly restless but intensely interested in people, food and bands. “Spending time with Aziz doesn’t feel like spending time with the guy the world sees,” Parks co-star Adam Scott tells me. “He’s a truly humble, smart, nice person. It’s weird. I watched his latest special and remembered, ‘Oh yeah, holy shit, Aziz is a superstar.’ If I could fill Madison Square Garden, I’d at least be kind of a dick.”

Ansari has an ongoing preoccupation with “douchebag bro culture”, and the jocks he says got “an unfair advantage” when he was growing up because texting and social media didn’t exist to show potential girlfriends how witty and smart you could be. Having come out of a relationship in his mid-20s into a heightened set of new dating rules about when to text, what to say, where to hook up and what any of it means, Ansari, now 32, became a touch obsessed with the paradox of choice; where decisions – from which person to be with to what toothbrush to buy – are arrested by the tyranny of endless options.

“When do you know that you’ve found the right person and should stop looking? Online dating is a clear example. The good is, like, you can meet anyone in the world. You can meet all these different people, you can find anyone, you have this huge resource. But the bad is, how the hell do you sort through all of that? And how do you know when you’re done? New people are always going to have an attraction to them because they’re new, and we’re so attracted to novelty. But at a certain point, being attracted to new and variety is a dangerous thing to go on.”

He describes Modern Romance as a sort of pop-sociological study of digital culture; examining the way everything from the baffling algorithms of Match.com to the swipe-as-you-like tech of Tinder has warped the way conventional romance plays out. It’s both insightful and cringe-making – built to resonate with anyone ever left wondering why their Tanya (“everyone has a Tanya”) never texted back.

He talks about interviews in the book conducted with women in retirement homes. “One study of women in 1967 [revealed] 76% of women said they would marry someone they were not romantically in love with. And that, like, blew me away. Women wanted to escape their parents’ homes and gain freedom – by getting married.”

Ansari’s fear of commitment, settling down and babies was the basis of at least two of his shows, one of them titled Buried Alive. “I’m not super-enlightened. I’ve talked to a lot of people and I have a lot of experiences to draw from, but like any other relationship, it’s tough, man – it’s work. My relationship is about two years in now and it’s, like, you have to deal with difficult logistical issues to maintain it. Like, I’m doing this [Netflix] show in New York right now and she moved [from New York] to LA to be with me and now I’m here.”

The as-yet-untitled Netflix project due later in the year, written, directed and starring Aziz (and his brother Aniz, and his doctor dad), is being made with his friend Alan Yang and produced by Parks and Recreation creator Mike Schur, who calls it “comedy investigative journalism”. But Ansari has also had a number of talked-about bit-parts in Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler movies, and wrote several film scripts that were bought and dropped; is full-blown movie megastardom coming next?

“Movies are such a frustrating experience,” he sighs. “You can dream about awards but I dream the smart way: I just hope the show is really good and that people I respect really like it. If you dream in that way, everything else falls into place. If you dream the other way, you’re always going to be disappointed and a curmudgeon.”

Ansari has always dodged ethnic stereotypes in the characters he plays, doing his bit to broaden the representation of south Asians in entertainment. But it’s still unavoidable in his day-to-day existence. A few years ago, in a last-minute slot at the Largo in LA, he did a short standup set where a woman in the audience heckled: “Why don’t you have a red dot on your forehead?”; Ansari asked her why she didn’t have “cunt” on hers. Politically, does he think a post-Obama America will be better or worse off? “I’m not qualified to answer that,” he stutters. “I’ve no cluuuee. I wouldn’t pretend to know an answer like that, I don’t follow politics closely enough to, I’d rather say that I don’t know rather than act like I have any insight.”

After he leaves our interview, I find out from the hotel staff that just before he came out to meet me, a British couple had stopped him in the lobby: they thought he was their taxi driver. Their bags were ready to be picked up, they kept pointing out, until Ansari had to put his hands up in the air in front of everyone and insist: “No, nope, still not your driver.”