Aasif Mandvi
Aasif Mandvi
Aasif Hakim Mandviwala, known professionally as Aasif Mandvi, is an Indian-American actor and comedian. He began appearing as an occasional contributing correspondent on The Daily Show on August 9, 2006. On March 12, 2007, he was promoted to a regular correspondent. He is the lead actor, co-writer and producer of the web series Halal In The Family which premiered on "Funny or Die" in 2015 and an actor, writer and co-producer of the HBO comedy series The Brink. Mandvi is...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth5 March 1966
CountryIndia
America undermines its own ideals when it ignores the very values it is promoting around the world. You cannot ask other people in the world to follow the law and act responsibly if we don't do the same ... and being afraid is not an excuse.
My father got a job at Bradford University in textiles. And he came for - I guess, you know, why do people immigrate? - like, for a better life to find, you know, a new world. And, you know, I think he always - he saw it as an opportunity. And so yeah so we came to this coal mining town in the north of England and that's where I grew up.
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.
There's no school that you can go to and learn how to be a "Daily Show" correspondent and how to interview people and, you know, essentially leave your soul outside the door and go in there and kind of, you know, destroy people's lives sometimes.
It's an ironic thing about being an immigrant kid, growing up - 'cause I grew up in the UK and went to a British boarding school and we would go to chapel every Sunday morning. And we'd actually have religious studies and religious studies means Christian studies where you study the Bible.
I think one of my favorite pieces I've ever done on the show which was about Hezbollah Israel conflict in 2006 and it was very pointed. It was a beautifully crafted piece of satire and it's a weird thing to say but it had a joke in there about 9/11 and I remember the audience sort of laughing but also kind of not knowing how to respond to that joke and it was just so - and I remember the tension after we did this joke on the air and there was this palpable gasp in the audience, but they were also laughing. And I thought oh, wow, that is something that is not being said in the Zeitgeist.
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.
I know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.
England has an interesting relationship with the Indian subcontinent because the years of colonization and the history between the two places.
Bradford specifically there were a lot of Pakistanis there. Even today it has a very large Pakistani population.It was something that I experienced - getting chased home from the bus stop after school by English kids, boarding school, being targeted for praying to what they call Allah wallah ding dong.
Paki- bashing was kind of this term that was used in general to beat up anyone that was from the Indian subcontinent.
For anybody who's ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.
I grew up on American pop culture so everything that I fantasized about to get out of this sort of humdrum world of Bradford was about America. So when we decided to move there I was on the plane.
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?