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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Actually I'm more culturally Muslim than religiously but being Muslim is an important part of my identity. As Muslim, I feel it's important to counter any form of bigotry, be it anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, etc. These forms of hate share a common denominator of misinformation and intentional fear mongering.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
An artist's job is simply to take the mirror in front of your face and hold it there. It's not to give you any answers. It is simply to take that mirror and point it at you.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
England has an interesting relationship with the Indian subcontinent because the years of colonization and the history between the two places.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
For anybody who's ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
For my parents it was all about getting a deal, my dad came to America and he heard of this concept of brunch. He didn't quite know what it was. And he thought it was this other meal that existed between breakfast and lunch. He was kind of like - I remember he sort of was like America has so much food that between breakfast and lunch they have to stop and eat again. They have brunch. It was completely legal it was, like, a legal meal that you could have. I mean, clearly it wasn't the only reason he came to America, but I think it certainly sweetened the pot for him.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
From my parent's generation the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love. It was a partnership. It's about creating family. It's about creating offspring.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I came from a very different sort of background and pedigree from the people who were on "The Daily Show". I was an actor. I was sort of - the irony is that I've done as much dramatic work in my career as comedic work and I don't really think of myself as a comedian.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
If people invited Muslims into their home every week by way of a TV show would go a long way to making people feel comfortable with Muslims and countering misconceptions about who we are. Plus, of course, that will make it easier for us to impose sharia law across America.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
If you choose to be a Muslim then you believe that it is on some level wrong to show the image of the Prophet Muhammad.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I mean, but obviously, in people's eyes, it still - it can still link Islam to terrorism. I mean, why does it make a difference that they're white?
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I'm Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food... they've never even tasted it!
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism - this idea of my own personal fulfillment.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
In Britain, you never get away from the fact that you're a foreigner. In the U.S., the view is it doesn't matter where you come from.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Indian culture is essentially much more of a we culture. It's a communal culture where you do what's best for the community - you procreate.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
In some ways for many years I was off the hook.When my niece was born after that their attention was focused on that and she did that. You know, that was in our family that's what she did. I went off and chased this dream and this career that very other few people in our, you know, in my family, but even culturally were doing.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I said we are Ghodratis and there's nothing that Ghodratis like more than a bargain.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I think family dynamics are definitely very interesting. And in my case my sister did get married. She gave my parents a grandchild.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I think I discovered my first, you know, my first image of a naked woman was sort of sneaking a peek at one of those magazines that was in my dad's store.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I think Islam has been hijacked by the idea that all Muslims are terrorists; that Islam is about hate, about war, about jihad - I think that hijacks the spirituality and beauty that exists within Islam. I believe in allowing Islam to be seen in context and in its entirety and being judged on what it really is, not what you think it is.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I think politicians and comedians have a lot in common. One is a group of approval-seeking narcissists who will say and do anything to be liked... and comedians are always talking about politics.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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?
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
It's an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I've always said I'm the worst representative of Muslim-Americans that's ever existed, because I've been inside more bars than mosques.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
I was born in India - but never really lived there.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
North Carolina precinct chairman and GOP executive committee member Don Yelton thinks his state's new voting restrictions are just fine.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Now the bigots have to get creative. Good luck coming up with slurs for Chechens. Go back where you came from, Ushanka head.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Of course the law's not racist.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Paki- bashing was kind of this term that was used in general to beat up anyone that was from the Indian subcontinent.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
People lament that there's no roles being written for South Asian or Muslim characters. But their parents don't want their children to go into the entertainment field. You don't get it both ways.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Re-colonizing it and sort of reverse-colonizing it to the point that today the national dish of Great Britain is Chicken Tikka Masala.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Samantha Bee said to me when I first started on the "Daily Show", she was like no - there is no - the only way you'll learn this job is by doing this job.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
So I had this completely unrealistic idea of what America was — but I wanted to be there.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
Statistically there is enough voter fraud to sway zero elections.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
The Daily Show writers are incredibly smart and very well plugged-in but occasionally they would need me for certain specific things, and I'd be like, 'Yeah, I completely know how to do that; I can solve that problem,and then I'd be like, 'Mom?
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
The experience of being on a show that is very much in the center of popular culture is exciting. You really feel like you're reaching people.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
The idea that I had anything to do with speaking about Islam or about the Muslim world was just absurd to my family. ... I hadn't been to the mosque in like 10 years.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
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.
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By AnonymAasif Mandvi
There's this existential crisis in America and in the West of, like - who am I? - based on this searching for individual fulfillment, which you don't necessarily have in the East in the same way because you're kind of told what to do. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just saying that's just, like, the reality.
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