Aziz Ansari reminds us that we’re a work in progress
Growing up Asian in South Carolina during the 2000s gives you a silent, seething rage for the rest of your life. This is a plain fact. Get called enough names early in your life and you just might pick up a microphone later, if only for the permission to speak to a predominately white crowd without interruption.
Aziz Ansari, who grew up in Bennettsville, S.C., has always been an angry comic. This sounds like a strange adjective for the man who got famous playing a fashion-obsessed dork in “Parks and Recreation,” the wannabe ladies’ man named Tom Haverford. But Haverford was, in some ways (but not all), an anti-stereotypical role for Ansari. “My last three roles were Randy, Chet and Tom,” Ansari said at a 2013 roast of James Franco, after several comics made remarks about Ansari being a gas station attendant, to which he replied, “I think it’s so cool that some of you guys were able to travel back in time to 1995 for those Indian jokes you did.”
Following “Parks and Recreation,” Ansari became an icon of the millennial generation, an anti-stereotypical comic who refused to play into racial humor, instead riffing on feminism, online dating and celebrity culture. His quiet rage was felt through his sheer existence as a rebellion against Hollywood tokenism. His pro-feminist statements on David Letterman went viral. He co-authored a dating book called “Modern Romance,” which I gobbled up in two days. Once, at a bar, a slick, fratty Indian-American salesperson wearing an expensive suit told me, “I’m just glad Aziz exists. He’s showing everyone that we’re cool, that we can get laid, too.”
In his stand-up, Ansari talked about dating women, many of them white. He talked about rap and hip-hop. He played up his celebrity status, often recounting stories of hanging out with the cultural king of the 2000s. Ansari’s Netflix series, “Master of None,” was praised for its vision of “radical inclusion.” Ansari became more than a comic who could sell out Madison Square Garden (Dane Cook can sell out Madison Square Garden). He was an auteur, plus he was brown and woke. He was a hero to more than just Asian people from South Carolina — he spoke to the new generation of entertainment consumers in a way Lena Dunham or Amy Schumer never could.
On Saturday night, at the Smart Financial Centre in Sugar Land, Ansari walked on to the stage a decidedly different man. He had longish, slightly unkept hair. He wore an expensive black leather jacket, the shiny kind that makes its wearer look like a Gucci mannequin, with a Metallica T-shirt underneath. He walked slowly, with a smug smile on his face. He had the swagger of a comic who doesn’t need to try very hard anymore.
During his opening bit, Ansari tapped one of the speakers on the stage, asking if he could get it turned up louder. Then he played a few pranks on the audience, which seemed ultimately funnier to Ansari than to them. During the rest of his hour, he didn’t talk about growing up in South Carolina. He didn’t talk about the infamous Babe.net story from January, in which an anonymous woman recounted a bad date with him, during which she felt he acted aggressively in a way that made her uncomfortable and violated her consent. But both biographical tidbits — that he’s an Asian guy from the South and that he’s now on the bad side of the #MeToo movement — informed the entirety of his material, which was brash and smug yet somehow remained characteristically virtuosic.
Ansari, in short, is angry about iPhones. He hates that we constantly look at them, even when we’re on the toilet. He’s annoyed that people feel the need to be constantly outraged at the news and that we insist on chiming in on every maddening story, such as when that white girl wore a Chinese prom dress or when those two black men were thrown out of Starbucks. He doesn’t want to be asked what he thinks about Apu from “The Simpsons” (though Ansari was one of several entertainers featured in the documentary “The Problem With Apu,” focusing on the character’s offensive existence). He even trolled the audience several times.
As usual, Ansari seemed to have lifted thoughts that plague our everyday and manifested them into clever bits, highlighting cultural problems while making fun of them. But “Working Out New Material” felt heavier than any previous Ansari routine, one weighed down by a deep sense of fatigue. This was a man who has been angry for too long, whose rage no longer manifests in the form of a smiley, high-pitched millennial wearing a tuxedo.
Watching Ansari own the stage, with such loose abandon, was strange. Deep down, I wanted “Master of None” to be the third act of the Asian kid from South Carolina. I wanted the natural conclusion of a minority performer who works very hard to be this beautiful television show, one that featured beautiful brown people in complex, poetic narratives.
I didn’t want Ansari’s story to end with him being famous enough to go home with a woman who felt extremely uncomfortable in his presence. “Working Out New Material” was Ansari’s refutation against a culture that he once helmed. One would have hoped, naively, for a celebration.
The term “woke” once meant being conscious of social systems of black oppression, a word by and for African-Americans who were conscious of their history. But the word has since been appropriated by the mainstream left and reduced to a type of performance of moral goodness. In 2018, it remains unclear if Aziz Ansari’s show is woke or not woke. Ansari spent the better part of his hour lampooning that kind of mindset. Ansari, in other words, has officially crossed the line from woke to anti-woke. He’s become a harbinger of the dangers of being too liberal, of caring too much about social justice, of fomenting too much outrage.
Ansari’s closing bit neither embraced nor refuted his postBabe.net existence. It was a simple one-liner that involved saying something funny in a funny accent (not the Indian one, which he never does). It was as if he had no closing argument because he was too tired of being that person that all young minorities have looked to for guidance — the person he stopped being after Babe.net hit publish on that article.
For the first time, Ansari didn’t have an answer for us, or was unwilling to offer one. By ragging on our tendency for instant gratification, “Working Out New Material” gave us something that symbolized not only what Ansari is right now but also the country as a whole — a work in progress.