Aziz Ansari's Latest Is 'Dangerously Delicious'
As part of our year-end wrap up, we are sharing the best Fresh Air interviews of 2012. This interview was originally broadcast on April 2, 2012.
During a recent stand-up tour, the comedian and star of Parks and Recreation, Aziz Ansari riffed on what he calls the "fears of adulthood."
You know, babies. Marriage. That kind of stuff.
"I see a lot of my friends are kind of entering serious stages of their lives where they're getting married and having children, and I'm getting to the age where that stuff is getting expected of me," Ansari tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And it's all very terrifying to me. It still feels like it's so far away."
Ansari certainly has a lot on his plate at the moment. He plays a low-level administrator on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, and recently released a new comedy special, called Dangerously Delicious, online. He got the idea partially from Louis C.K., who released his own $5 comedy special on the Web last year.
"Obviously, it was a tremendous success when [Louis C.K.] released it that way, and I started getting tweets and things saying, 'Can you release your stand-up special this way? I think it'd be great if you did it,' " Ansari says. "I thought, 'Well, if that really worked and people are really behind it, why try to fight that trend?' [Louis C.K.] clearly hit a nerve with that release strategy. So I did it and as soon as I did it, the overwhelming response was, 'I'm so glad you did it, too. I hope more comedians do this.'"
Ansari has been involved in the comedy world for a long time. He acted in MTV's sketch series Human Giant, and he played the part of a xenophobic fruit vendor in HBO's Flight of the Conchords. Now, on Parks and Recreation, his character, Tom, dreams of becoming a mogul like Russell Simmons or Sean "P. Diddy" Combs.
"But he's in this really small town, and he's too scared to go to New York or L.A. to try and make that happen, so he really tries to live those dreams in the confines of this very small town," says Ansari.
A Childhood Filled With Boredom
Ansari himself grew up in a small town in South Carolina, where he says there was frequently nothing to do.
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