Inside With: Aziz Ansari
When he swept through Chicago last summer, we exchanged a few e-mails with Aziz Ansari. We promised to keep in touch. 24 hour marathon of his new sketch comedy show on MTV or no, he kept his promise. Aziz is performing stand-up at Chicago's Lakeshore Theater June 1 and 2. His new sketch show, "Human Giant," is all over MTV these days, and he and his cohorts Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer recently hosted a straight 24 hours of "Human Giant" madness on their new home channel, entertaining guests including Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, John Krasinski, Bob Odenkirk, Michael Showalter, Ted Leo, Todd Barry and Zach Galifianakis.
The Bastion caught Aziz on his cell phone while he was heading up the elevator in his apartment building on Wednesday. He explained to us how a foray into internet ads in college helped him pay the bills while beginning with comedy, how a ten year old boy he calls "the most amazing performer I've ever seen" scolded him for laughing on the set of his own show, and why eating dry ramen noodles right out of the package is a really bad idea.
AZIZ: I'm moving out of my place tomorrow so I'm packing all of my stuff.
BASTION: Are you moving into a big fat new place since you're so successful now?
AZIZ: No, it's actually quite the opposite, I'm going to end up paying more for less space. A roommate couldn't decide if he wanted to stay, and...I have to move. Bummer. The exact opposite of moving on up. I'm trading a smaller piece of the pie for a shittier piece of the pie.
BASTION: You're coming out to Chicago for some shows at the Lakeshore Theater soon, and "Human Giant" is busting out all over the place. I know people who stayed up for the whole 24 hour MTV marathon.
AZIZ: It was so much fun doing it, and it is awesome that they let us do it. Sort of a risky gamble on their part.
BASTION: So they really did let you do whatever you wanted, you picked the bands and the guests and stuff?
Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru
AZIZ: Yeah, we never had to pitch them anything, like with the show where we have to pitch the sketches. They didn't know about Billy Crystal, and Vin Diesel, and all that stuff. We just did whatever we wanted. The only restriction we really had was we were unable to show all the shows we wanted to because of legal issues with music and talent clearance but other than that we got to do whatever we wanted to do.
BASTION: Was it hard to stay up for the whole twenty-four hours, or were you so excited that it wasn't a problem?
AZIZ: We were able to stay up because we were so fired up and trying to keep everything moving. You didn't really have time to get tired, because as soon as we went to commercial break, it was like "what's next, what are we doing next, what's the next bit," and we were constantly on the move and working on stuff so it didn't really give you a chance to get tired.
BASTION: I actually learned a very valuable trick from that show, when Tegan and Sara came on, and they brought their favorite crummy snacks from when they were kids - I'd never seen anyone eat ramen noodles without water before, and I tried it, and I want to thank you for that. (Editor's note - it was dry and salty and not very nice.)
AZIZ: Oh my god, that's terrible, don't do that. People did that in high school, I remember. I didn't support it back then and I don't support it now. Probably pretty dangerous.
BASTION: Probably dangerous. So how much creative freedom do you guys have with "Human Giant?"
AZIZ: We can pretty much do what we want to do. They didn't really give us too many notes, which was cool. They don't really do many comedy shows, so they didn't give us too many notes, and we pretty much were able to do what we wanted to do.
BASTION: Were there ever any bits that you pitched that they just said "Uh, no, that's just not going to work."
AZIZ: No, they would never say that, but they might be like "we don't really get this one." If it was something we really wanted to do, they'd say, okay, shoot it, and we'll see how it looks. Like for example, they weren't really crazy about the "Catching a Predator" one, they thought it might be too confusing, but we were like "we really believe in the idea, and we think we can do it," and they said "why don't you shoot it," and now it's one of their favorites. They were great in that regard.
BASTION: My personal favorite of what I've seen of "Human Giant" so far is the "Shutterbugs" stuff, and especially the season finale with the little kid, Bobb'e J Thompson, who fires you guys from the talent agency - he is just unbelievable. (Link to that video here.) I'm wondering how you found him, and how the writing changed once you found that kid, because he's so astonishingly good - how did that whole thing come about?
AZIZ: A few years back I stumbled onto this show called "America's Most Talented Kids," along with Paul Scheer, and I saw Bobb'e J on that, where he was a judge, and he was like this daffy little kid who made all of these wisecracks, and I thought he was so funny, and I actually started doing a bit about him in my stand-up, and I knew him from that, and then I saw him on the Tracy Morgan show, and he was good on that, and he's been in a couple of movies and things, and he was clearly successful, and when we were writing the "Shutterbugs" season finale, and I think Jason said "What if you got fired and your boss was a little kid?" And I had been talking to some casting person about Bobb'e J, randomly, and we had the attitude that the character would be this high status kid, just yelling at us, and have a complete status reversal.
And we thought "the only kid who can do this is Bobb'e J," actually in the script the character was named Bobb'e J, that's how much we knew it had to be him, and at first he turned us down because there was some cursing in the script, or his agent or his parents turned it down, and then we took all the cursing out and we told him we'd buy him an X-Box or something like that, and he agreed to do it.
The next day we met up with him and shot it, and there's a behind the scenes shot of this of me and Jason legitimately nervous meeting him, it was so funny, we were so full of genuine admiration for this kid. Then we started shooting the scene, and it's pretty dialogue heavy, but he memorized it really fast, and then he was improvising jokes that totally blew our stuff out of the water, and the majority of what made it into the cut is stuff he improvised, and it was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life. We couldn't believe it.
This kid is like ten years old, and his comedic instincts are far beyond what any kid should be, and was improvising better than, like, I've never seen anything like it - Matt Walsh (of UCB) was there, and Rob (Huebel), Paul (Scheer), and they have years of improv experience, and all of them were blown away at how this kid was improvising. Easily the best performance of the whole series. We couldn't believe how he took ahold of the role, and made it his own. If you think of any joke you remember from that scene, it was all Bobb'e J. The calculator bit, that was him, the "I got a pool in the back of my house and I don't even know how to swim," that was him, you know, all of that stuff.
And we were laughing so hard, we had to shoot all of those reaction shots after Bobb'e J left, because Rob and I were breaking up so much. Every time he said anything...he would even get mad at us, like he came up with the thing where he jumps on a chair and says "You're fired, fools!" we were laughing every time, and he got pissed at us, like "Come on guys, let's get serious here, we gotta shoot this!" But yeah, during the series, there were a lot of fun moments, but watching Bobb'e J work just took the cake, and I hope in the second season he can do more stuff with us.
BASTION: He really is astonishing. While I was watching I thought "there's no way they wrote everything that he's doing," yet he's just a baby, what did you say, ten years old?
AZIZ: Yeah, ten years old. Just everything that he did, every line, like where he says "Little 9/11...shame." His line, and the way he said it, were just perfect. His delivery is just perfect. He's the most amazing performer I've ever seen.
BASTION: What's a typical week of comedy like for you now?
AZIZ: Right now we're in between seasons, Jason was still editing a few weeks ago, but we finished most of our publicity and stuff. I'm taking it easy a little, heading to Chicago. I like to go away on the weekends when I can, but still do Eugene Mirman's show, my show at Crash Test, but it's pretty loose. We'll be starting again with Human Giant before too long, and once that kicks in, the rest of your life sort of goes away, because there's so much work involved.
BASTION: You're only 24 and you've done so much already. How have you managed to progress so quickly?
AZIZ: I started when I was pretty young, when I was 18 or 19, I guess, and a lot of older people were helpful and looked out for me, helped me find opportunities and stuff, and I've just been in the right place at the right time. For example, having those short films made right at the time that people were looking for stuff like that, we had a DVD of those made just for ourselves, and that helped. And music and comedy coming together, that helped, I've always been into music.
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BASTION: I read in an interview that early on you weren't too worried about getting headshots and finding an agent like a lot of other comics were, you just wanted to work on your comedy, and I assume that's been key is that you weren't worried about getting famous or getting a tv show, you just wanted to do the work, and do the stuff you wanted to get better at, and develop like that.
AZIZ: Yeah, I have always set short term goals for myself, and they got bigger as I got older, and always, the main focus was, if you can get seven minutes of killer material, you're going to go far in this business. Eugene told me that once, if you have a killer seven minutes, no one's going to say no to you. Everyone's always going to want someone who can kill on stage. You can't deny it. You can say some guy sucks, but if he gets up and does well, then the industry can't say "people won't get that," because the audience just did get it. That's the cool thing about stand-up.
BASTION: I read that you started an internet company in college that was supporting you by the time you graduated, and maybe that helped support your creativity a bit.
AZIZ: Yes, with a friend from high school I started a business that was related to the little ads you see on the side of Google searches. It's called affiliate marketing, and we did that through google ad words, that's a simple way of putting it. (Dryly) Very interesting, and hilarious.
BASTION: (Dryly and dorkily) Yes, incredibly hilarious. I read an interview with you by Carol Hartsell of Drink at Work, and she described you as "young, smart, sweet and funny," which I'm sure you're sick of hearing. Would you like to offer something filthy and offensive to offset this "sweet" image that's being put out there about you?
AZIZ: I'm sure you could insert any random line from "Human Giant" in to achieve that effect.
BASTION: Okay, then, I'm going to quote you from an episode of "Shutterbugs": "See you at the tiny Oscars, motherf*ckers!"
