Aziz Ansari, Comedian

You were featured in a Wall Street Journal Online article about people coping with day jobs and performance. You work at an Internet company that you co-founded and do standup part-time. What is your goal as a comedian?
My goal is to produce work that I’m proud of and work with people that I respect. I want to keep doing what I’m doing now and get into bigger audiences and get on TV, but mainly I want to keep doing creative work. I’m pretty lucky because my internet job isn’t too high pressure. For my one man show, I’ve been making PowerPoint slides, I’ve had to stop doing work for the internet company for a few days, though with the broken hand I haven’t been able to do much work anyway lately.

How do you incorporate your politics into your comedy?
The gay marriage/box turtle joke [about a political who said that once we allow gay marriage, next we’ll have people wanting to marry box turtles], that’s probably my favorite political joke. I find the gay marriage issue so ridiculous, I’m able to vent my political frustration with that joke. I haven’t been doing as much political stuff lately. After the election , like many people, I’ve been kindof dejected. I want to write more political stuff, last year that’s pretty much all I was doing, but this year I’ve been doing bits about stuff going on in my life. That’s kindof risky, if nothing happens to me, if I don’t punch a wall…

In terms of the stories you tell onstage, do you go out looking for funny scenarios, do they find you, or are you simply able to cull the funniest parts?
I don’t think I actively pursue it. The one time I have is that I have a phone conversation with my mom, she doesn’t know I recorded it. I was telling her about punching the wall, and when she asks why, as a joke, I say “because somebody wrote something racist on the wall.” And she says “Did they write it about you?” “No.” “Did they write it on your wall?” “No.”

When I told her I punched a wall, I just envisioned me as this antiracist vigilante guy who saw something racist on the wall and just punched it, but in her head I come home to my apartment and see a personalized racist message thrown on my wall. I knew I could use it for other stuff, the wall punching thing. All this crazy stuff has happened that’s been under no control of mine. I have a business I do with one other guy, and he recently punched something and had the same fracture I did.

You’ve performed at many different comedy nights and rooms. What’s your favorite one and why?
I think my favorite place to perform is Invite Them Up or UCB. I really like all the people who perform at Invite Them Up, I really respect everyone there. I really like the audiences because the audiences there, they really appreciate it when people perform stuff that’s different. They appreciate experimentation. At other types of shows, if you try something a little different, you get this look of disapproval. At Invite Them Up, you don’t get that disapproval, they’re more open-minded, more fun to perform for, more on my same wavelength as to what kind of people they are.

Can you give an example of something you’ve done that’s experimental?
The thing I did about M.I.A. I told a story about how when I went to see M.I.A. at the Knitting Factory after the show I saw her and said something to her, and nothing really happened, and I was like “Here are a couple scenarios I wish would’ve happened instead.” I got Eugene Mirman to play M.I.A. and we read these different scenarios. The video started getting passed around on all these music blogs, and one guy was just stunned that when I started the bit, all these people knew who she was. It was absurd to this guy that that many people in a comedy audience would know who M.I.A. is.

What’s your favorite or most memorable show you’ve performed?
I did the show at UCB on Election Night and that was really fun because there were a lot of people from the UCB community who hadn’t seen my stuff. It was a really fun night, until the election results started pouring in. I did some standup in the beginning.

One night I did invite them up and it was just an insane lineup: me, Eugene Mirman, Louis CK, Patton Oswalt, Todd Barry, Jon Benjamin, Jon Glaser, I couldn’t believe I was performing with all these guys I look up to so much. All those guys I respect so much and that show I did on my birthday, that was the one I did the M.I.A. bit, I’d done it before at UCB and I revised it a bit beforehand and gave it to Eugene beforehand and he helped me do that. That was the first time I’d done anything with those guys at the same time.

Your website is called Aziz Is Bored, and you post to a blog called I’m. You’re. Idle. Why are you so bored and what do you do to combat boredom?
What I do to combat being bored is being productive with my creative work and try to create interesting things to share with other people. I watch the hit Fox series 24. I don’t really have that much to do, my internet company doesn’t take up that much time. I don’t have to do that much work.

In terms of your favorite comedians, what is it that you like about them?
Anybody that’s doing stuff that’s interesting and original. I don’t like that many comedians, the ones I like are doing the most different original stuff, they’re just good writers. Everybody I like for different reasons. I like Demetri Martin a lot because he does real original things with music and art, Eugene Mirman has all this interesting stuff like recording phone calls, Todd Barry’s an amazing writer, Patton Oswalt has this amazing energy and commitment to his bits. Out of all the guys I like, there’s different aspects to each one, they’re all doing very original stuff and they’re very interesting, any bit I do I try to keep it somewhat interesting.

I want to keep the audience interested, like in Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure, it was really funny but also really interesting, the same with Demetri Martin’s last show, Spiral Bound, you were hearing a lot about what was happening in their lives and you were interested to hear what would happen next.

You often tell a story, such as the one about your being in India during the tsunami, over and over, yet I’ve found that you manage to make the same story funny and different each time. How do you manage to keep it fresh for yourself, and for your audience?
My whole approach to stories is I always find you can refine them and make better and tighter. Even bits, I try to find ways to make them better. If you tell the same story over and over, it can get kindof boring for me so I try telling it in a different way, try different jokes and phrasing and enunciation. I’m still pretty interested in working out the stuff about my hand. For my one man show on Monday, that’s gonna be all the stuff that’s happened to me this year under the premise that someone asked me to make a mix tape, and I realized all the songs I’ve chosen reveal what I’ve gone through this year, and the show is me talking about why I’ve chosen these songs.

In Aziz's own words: "For the run-through of my untitled one man show on Monday at 7 pm at UCB, come to hear rough sloppy unpolished Aziz Ansari comedy. Polished, refined stuff I'm tired of can be found March 31st at the Premium Blend showcase. Catch more Aziz Ansari standup action April 5th at PSNBC at the Marquee, April 7th at Welcome to Our Week at Rififi, April 14th at Sweet at The Slipper Room and April 18th at Spoiler Film Festival at Knitting Factory. Visit his website, Azizisbored.com, as well as I'm.You're.Idle for more information.