How Aziz Ansari’s comedy changed

As a comedian, Aziz Ansari’s greatest strength has always been his ability to skewer the hypocrisy of both millennials and boomers – often during the same routine. He makes this loud-pitched, high-pitched voice for millennials and their parents the suitably faux-husky. At the distribution level, it’s not as efficient as (Dave) Chappelle, but the writing is generally excellent. In Ansari’s latest Netflix standup special,night club comedian(filmed in front of a small audience in New York’s Comedy Cellar a few months earlier), a similar routine talks about how poor working conditions and stagnant wages caused many working-class Americans to become oppressive. Leaving industrial jobs for over a decade. And as Ansari points out, Covid-19 has only made things worse.

Adding Avocado and TikTok

“Have you just been to Chipotle in Pennsylvania? It’s intense! It’s like Covid (…) to Chipotle,” says Ansari, before launching into a hilarious parody of a troubled Chipotle manager. “We have no There is no guacamole! There’s a shortage of avocados and our guacamole guy quit last week and now he’s making $50,000 guacamole videos on TikTok.

See how 38-year-old Ansari uses avocado and TikTok in this joke: They’ve been narrative icons, almost, for millennia. Scour the surface of the joke and you’ll see that it’s actually dense with meaning – the vagaries of the ‘influential economy’, the decay of old US manufacturing centers, the very real economic crisis that COVID has created and so on. This is Ansari’s strength: writing contrasting routines that cover topics wildly disparate in contemporary America. His Netflix show Master of None is still one of the smartest, funniest contemporary dating customs around.

He’s quicker and appears to be clearly less playful and low on energy – this was a comedian bouncing off practically every step he did. Earlier there were a lot of hand gestures and silly voices and visual humor—not so much now.

Ansari draws a similar sleight-of-hand, criticizing ‘sustainability’ and ‘wellness’ ecosystems – places that, too often, see the absence of original ideas or innovation. In this routine Ansari once again brings out his “millennial” voice and, this time, accelerates until it all turns into a confusing ball of jargon.

“Maybe I should invest more in crypto? Mathias, are you going to the event tonight? There’s going to be a new pop-up to this collaboration, like Travis Scott is doing with Citibank and Chips Ahoy and they These limited-edition chips are selling Ahoy, like, emerging artists and whenever you go. Get this limited-edition tote bag with this limited-edition t-shirt from, like, eco-friendly emerging streetwear brand and when you go. Coming home, the tote bag turns into like, NFTs and, like, the NFTs start to deejay … and it’s all sustainable.”

Quiet, with a disdain for online culture

In 2018, Ansari was accused of sexual misconduct by an anonymous woman who was interviewed bybabe.net. It is fair to say that these allegations, some of which he addressed during his last specialroad to nowhere, has drastically changed Ansari’s comedy style, and not all changes have been for the better. He’s quicker and appears to be clearly less playful and low on energy – this was a comedian bouncing off practically every step he did. There were a lot of hand gestures and silly voices and visual humor before—not so much now. Instead, there is now a certain bitter and battered wisdom in his jokes, as if he had prematurely transformed into an old, ‘wise owl’ persona.

Ansari kept making joke after joke about how we were all trying to “wake out” each other and it was becoming increasingly difficult to see these jokes as anything other than vengeance. At one point he even went on the “how can you trust anything on the Internet” garden path, for good measure, saying “this is the era of ‘alternative facts'”.

Innight club comedianThere is an extended talk about Ansari not trusting technology anymore, since the wave of criticism he received on social media in 2018. He uses a flip phone now: “If I want to text someone, I have to say something really specific. Them!” He also says: “It works… I got my mind back, ya know?”

One step up from 2019

These are mild bitter feelings expressed by a person who feels harsh in the court of public opinion. this bitterness got worseroad to nowhereFor me when I saw the show live in New Delhi in May 2019 (Hannibal Buress was opening for Ansari in a massively packed house). Ansari kept making joke after joke about how we were all trying to “wake out” each other and it was becoming increasingly difficult to see these jokes as anything other than vengeance. At one point he walked down the “how can you believe anything on the Internet” garden path, for good measure, adding that “this is the era of ‘alternative facts'”, referring to an Orwellian neologism usually called Kellyanne Conway. He was once a senior counselor in Trump’s White House.

Luckily,night club comedian, at a runtime of about 30 minutes, is too small to accommodate such pettiness. Hence, it is counted among the better recent works of Ansari. One hopes that going forward, he keeps the bitterness and meanness to a minimum and channelizes more of that ‘wise owl’ energy.