A Night Out With Aasif Mandvi
May 20, 2007
By DAN LEVIN
A STINT on national television is all well and good, but sometimes the parents just want grandchildren.
“My mother is threatening to take me to India to find a wife,” said Aasif Mandvi, the rakishly earnest Middle Eastern correspondent on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”
He was ensconced in a billow of pineapple-scented smoke on a recent night at Horus Cafe, a hookah bar in the East Village, lamenting his own international-relations crisis. But Mr. Mandvi had an exit strategy. “I was planning on making it a documentary, but then my Dad says: ‘Are you an idiot? What woman is going to talk to you with a film crew in her face?’ ” Mr. Mandvi said in the same deadpan he wields with Mr. Stewart.
His audience of old friends were keen to contribute a bit of emotional diplomacy.
“I wish I was Indian,” said his writing partner Jill Anderson, who is also an actor, “because then I would have an arranged marriage and be done with it.”
“How was your samosa?” asked Jim Wisniewski, an actor and old college buddy of Mr. Mandvi’s from the University of South Florida. “Mi-mosa,” said Mr. Mandvi, a Mumbai native, feigning insult.
“I’m so baked,” he wheezed loudly before passing the hookah hose to Ms. Anderson, who was in town from Los Angeles to work on a pilot they are developing about a dysfunctional Indian self-help guru. “It’s based very loosely on Deepak Chopra,” she said, exhaling.
Between pita-fuls of hummus, the three discussed current events. Like the fight against global warming:
Ms. Anderson: “In L.A., if you don’t have the right grocery bag at Trader Joe’s you’ll get booed out!”
Then the waiter came by. “You look like that guy in ‘Spider-Man,’ ” he said.
Indeed, Mr. Mandvi played Mr. Aziz, the pizzeria owner in “Spider-Man 2.” “They sent me 600 Mr. Aziz collectible cards to sign,” Mr. Mandvi lamented. “You get into a Zen state when you’re signing all those cards. After the first hundred you start to give each one its own special signature.”
Next, an Indian woman at a nearby table inquired if Mr. Mandvi was Russell Peters, an Indian-Canadian comedian. Once corrected, the woman’s companion, also Indian, offered an apology. (“I love Jon Stewart! Sorry, we’ve been trying to place you, you’re familiar and brown.”) Ms. Anderson’s face looked like she’d just seen Ann Coulter. “That’s so racist,” she hissed.
“Well,” said Mr. Mandvi shrugging, after the offending table had snapped a photo with him and left, “brown people have a club.”
After more than a decade in theater (where he took on serious issues like Muslim detainees in Cuba and the Indian immigrant experience), on television and in films and commercials, Mr. Mandvi, himself a Muslim, has a national stage that showcases his comedic side without pigeonholing him into the kind of roles show business often dictates to men of South Asian descent: doctor, merchant, cabby, terrorist.
After dinner, he shuttled over to Little Branch, a bar in Greenwich Village packed with yuppie types and deafening jazz, where the banter again sounded like political satire.
“How large is the threat?” asked his friend Hope Stevenson, referring to his mother’s intent to create her own version of “The Bachelor” for him. “Like Orange? Or Yellow?”
“That information is classified,” Mr. Mandvi replied.
As the stockpile of drained glasses grew, the coalition of the willing dwindled, and Mr. Mandvi voted for a quick withdrawal. “I don’t mean to cut and run,” he said, aching to get home to the Upper West Side, “but I need to get some sleep.”