No Land's Man

by Aasif Mandvi

  Then the buzzer rang.

  I stopped in my tracks. I turned and saw Brooke’s husband greeting a hodgepodge motley crew of sweaty, stoned, drunk brown people as they tumbled into the apartment, laughing and singing, wearing New Year’s Eve hats and blowing noisemakers. My friends had arrived.

  I turned and marched toward them to warn them that perhaps we had miscalculated the tone of this party and that maybe they should in some way bring it down a notch or two, but I was too late. My friends raided the buffet table, stuffing mini quiches in their mouths and grabbing handfuls of chocolate truffles and sushi. One even dared to raid Brooke herself, taking selfies with her and telling her what a huge fan he was of her work, at a decibel level that ensured the rest of her guests knew it as well.

  I stood paralyzed in the middle of the floor, wanting to talk to Brooke but also wanting to disappear, as what seemed like a drunken Bollywood wedding party invaded this mostly Caucasian, patrician cocktail reception. I had a dreadful premonition that I had made a terrible mistake by coming here and was gripped with an unsettling conspicuousness that made me retreat toward the door. Food was being eaten, pictures were being taken, loudness and drunkenness abounded until after a few minutes Carol appeared by my side with an apologetic expression.

  “Umm . . . I’m sorry, this might have been a bad idea,” she began. “Brooke doesn’t know these people and she doesn’t feel comfortable having all these strangers in her home. She told me to tell you that you are welcome to stay, but your friends, unfortunately . . .”

  “I completely understand,” I said, cutting her off. I looked at Brooke as she stood by the buffet table in mid-conversation and I looked at my friends, who were stuffing their faces with cupcakes.

  “But I want to stay,” I heard young Aasif say. “I don’t want to leave. It’s Brooke Shields! The girl on your wall, remember? And she invited you to her house. We’ve arrived.”

  I looked between the elegant Brooke and my disheveled friends.

  Suddenly I felt the sting of a half-eaten sandwich hit me on the side of the face. With it came a familiar voice that I had not heard in many years.

  “Yeah, get out Monday-wala,” Brian called to me from across the room as he stepped out from behind the curtains. “You and your curry-breathing friends don’t belong here. Pathetic little Monday-wala, still getting chased away and still can’t get the girl. Boo-hoo.”

  “Shut up, you wanker!” I heard young Aasif scream, as he charged at Brian from across the room and leapt on him, throwing him against the buffet table. I had a momentary heart attack as I watched the two of them careen around the living room, punching and kicking each other until it became clear to me that no one else was seeing what I was seeing. Just as I vowed that I would never eat another pot brownie ever again, Carol suddenly came back into focus.

  “Aasif,” she said, “did you hear me? I’m sorry. Your friends need to go.”

  “It’s totally cool,” I said calmly, watching the melee no one else could see. “We’re all gonna go.”

  I gathered up my friends, in some cases taking stuffed pastries and deviled eggs out of their hands and mouths and ushered us all to the door. As I walked out, I looked over to where Brooke was standing, but she was nowhere to be found. I had an impulse to go search for her and explain myself, but I didn’t. Instead I stepped into the elevator with my posse and went down to the street.

  Unfazed by the experience and still wanting to party, my friends talked about how the night was still young and where we should go next. I walked silently for a few blocks until I saw younger Aasif standing on a street corner. His hair was a mess, his lip was bleeding, he had a black eye and his clothes were torn.

  “How’d you do?” I asked him, smiling.

  “I kicked his ass,” he said.

  “Good for you,” I replied.

  “Did you get to talk to Brooke?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Bummer,” he said.

  “Not really,” I replied putting my arm around him. “Turns out, there was nothing I needed to say.”

  THE JIHADIST OF IRONY

  IS THIS JON STEWART FELLOW CRAZY? How can he hire a guy who doesn’t even know how to do a proper salaam to his parents to be his senior bloody Muslim correspondent?”

  “It’s a comedy show, Dad.”

  “I hope so,” my father said. “Is he expecting you to be funny?”

  “Yes,” I said defensively. “Why is that so hard to believe? I’ve done a lot of comedy. You saw me do street improvisational comedy when I worked at Disney MGM Studios. I was in a very successful sketch comedy group in New York and remember on Broadway when I did Oklahoma!? I was hilarious as the peddler.”

  “Beta, we loved you in Oklahoma!,” my mother chimed in on the other line. “Don’t listen to your father. You were very funny in that. The scenery was amazing. It was incredible. You really felt like you were in Oklahoma.”

  I sighed.

  “Remember this,” my father continued. “If Jon Stewart asks you any questions or your opinion about Islam, don’t you say a word, just have him call your mother, she knows everything.”

  “Yes, beta,” agreed my mom. “Just tell him to call me, because you don’t want to say the wrong thing on television and then get your entire family in trouble.”

  “Don’t humiliate your entire family!” continued my dad. “Otherwise we will be a laughingstock from here to Mumbai. By the way, congratulations! This is very exciting. We are very proud of you!”

  The day that I became the senior Middle East/Muslim/All Things Brown correspondent on The Daily Show was just like any other day. Kind of. It began with me sitting in the park with my laptop writing a letter to my ex-girlfriend who I had recently found out was engaged. I had been in a miserable funk about the engagement for about a week, and when I say funk I mean not eating and listening to Ben Harper’s “Another Lonely Day” on an iTunes loop. Sometimes I would talk to friends who would listen to me go on about my pathological inability to truly commit to someone who loved me, which would then launch me into singing Ben Harper’s “Another Lonely Day.” The letter I was writing was incredibly cathartic. It felt deep and meaningful and said all the things I had never said when we were together. It was the kind of letter that I knew my ex would probably skim through and then throw away, because she had not been living in denial for the past year, had actually moved on, and didn’t want to explain to her fiancé why her ex-boyfriend was writing a ten-page letter to her a year after their breakup.

  Then my cell phone rang. It was my manager’s assistant.

  “The Daily Show is looking for someone who looks Middle Eastern,” he said. “Do you want to go down and read for them?”

  Well, here we go again, I thought to myself. Even though this sounded like it could be some bizarre Homeland Security sting operation, I knew what it really was. This would be no different than that time I was the voice of Saddam Hussein on the David Letterman show or the time I played a tech support agent from Bangalore for Jimmy Kimmel. I knew if I said yes to this, my day would end with me either wearing a fake beard yelling, “Death to America!” or worse still, wearing a turban, sitting on a carpet, and pretending to fly.

  Filled with a surprising fortitude and a devil-may-care attitude that was no doubt the direct result of heartbreak, I said, “Tell The Daily Show to go fuck themselves.” And hung up the phone.

  It rang again a few minutes later.

  “Actually, they would like you to come in and read for the role of a correspondent,” my manager’s assistant said when I finally picked up.

  I thought about this for a moment. I had watched The Daily Show, I was a fan, but even though I had done a lot of comedy, I mostly associated it with stand-up types. I was a real actor, I thought to myself. I had cut my teeth on Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shakespeare. The Daily Show seemed like the last place I wanted to be.

  “Well, I am very sad today,” I said. “I don’t think I can be funny. Perhaps I can g
o in another day. You see, I found out my ex just got engaged and I am in the middle of writing a heart-wrenching—”

  “Sorry,” he interrupted, “I have another call coming in, but they are only seeing people until three today, what time should I tell them you will be there?”

  “Two forty-five,” I said.

  Three hours later I walked into The Daily Show building. After a brief wait I was called in to the studio. Jon Stewart stood up from behind his desk wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, shook my hand, and introduced himself.

  “Thanks for coming down,” he said.

  “Of course,” I replied. “I’m a big fan of the show.”

  “We tape the show in front of a live audience,” he continued, sounding somewhat concerned. “Have you ever performed before a live audience before?”

  “I’ve been on Broadway,” I responded, eager to let him know that he was getting prime “actor” rib, not some cheap flank steak.

  “Oh, great,” he responded. “Well, let’s do this, then. Just stand on your mark and look into the teleprompter and here we go.”

  “Do you want me to do an accent?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Jon replied. “We don’t need an accent. I don’t think we need an accent. Just as you are.”

  This was something brown actors don’t hear all that often when auditioning for television so I was pleasantly surprised, even though I had been practicing my go-to generic Middle Eastern accent for the last fifteen minutes in the green room. Instead, consummate professional that I am, I thought, “Fuck it, I’m just gonna impersonate Stephen Colbert.” I cocked my eyebrow, assumed a rather arched comic tone and spoke with faux seriousness as I said the words that came up on the teleprompter.

  Jon stood up from his desk and turned to me after the audition. He was smiling from ear to ear.

  “Welcome to The Daily Show!” he said. “Do you have plans this evening? We tape at six.”

  That was it. At first I thought I might be part of a weird Daily Show gotcha prank, since jobs don’t usually happen like that, and to be fair I spent the next several months in trial mode until they offered me an official contract. But in that moment, just like that, I became the Gupta/Zakaria/Velshi/Amanpour masala on the Daily Show smorgasbord, which at that point mostly consisted of white people. More significantly, however, I also brought the halal factor by becoming The Daily Show’s ironically named “senior Muslim correspondent.” This was all in spite of the fact that I was a terrible example of a Muslim and knew nothing about the news except what I learned from watching The Daily Show. The last thing I had any knowledge of was how to be a “Muslim comedy journalist person.”

  I spent the first year on the show convinced that I was the wrong guy for the job and that they would soon discover they had made a terrible mistake. I flashed forward to the end of my career and saw the highlight reel run through my mind: Aasif Mandvi played more doctors than any other actor in the history of American cinema but the pinnacle of his career came when he was fired by Jon Stewart.

  But after some time I became aware of the fact that people seemed to be responding positively to what I was doing on the show and something started happening that had never happened to me before: I began getting shout-outs on the streets. I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time, so it was mostly liberal Jews, unless I went downtown, where it was NYU students and the occasional hipster wearing a top hat riding a skateboard. This wasn’t so odd in and of itself—it kind of comes with the territory. But then brown people started to recognize me: Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, and Muslims. Muslims began to come up to me on the street and would say things like, “Thank you for what you are doing,” “Keep it up,” or worse still, “A salaam alaikum.”

  My experience with Muslims before this was mostly at my parents’ mosque, where, judged for my spouseless-actor-in-New-York lifestyle, everyone treated me as if I had a bottle of whiskey in my sock and a pig for a best friend. But now, suddenly, Muslims began to treat me as if I was one of their own. They wanted to hug me; they wanted to tell me how using satire to address the issues of the Middle East and the war on terror on The Daily Show was oftentimes more effective than the work they were doing through the “Islam Anti-Defamation League.” They also wanted to know if I was married, because they would like to introduce me to their daughter.

  It all made me incredibly uncomfortable for two reasons. Firstly, I realized that they thought I was like them and I was not. My relationship with Islam was complicated and contentious. I had taken great delight in arguing with conservative Muslims who would tell me crazy shit like, “Eating pork will make you want to sleep with your mother,” or in provoking imams by telling them that they could learn as much about the human condition by reading Rumi or Shakespeare as they could from reading the Koran. I rarely went to the mosque, I never fasted, and I only prayed namaaz on the holy nights because my mom bugged me about it.

  The second reason it made me uncomfortable was that I liked it. I liked knowing that what I got to say on the show, even though I didn’t always write it, was having an impact. Not in terms of policy, or to lawmakers, but to Muslims in America. The fact that there was a brown person, openly identified as Muslim, on national television, talking about the relationship between America and the Muslim world from a vastly underrepresented point of view was a big deal for them. That that brown person happened to be me was absurdly bananas but it started to make me feel, dare I say . . . Muslimy. The whole thing was very unsettling.

  The longer I spent time on The Daily Show standing in front of a green screen pretending to report from war zones and hot spots around the world—most often from somewhere in the Middle East—the more I began to realize that The Daily Show was radicalizing me. I was being allowed to express the outrage that had lain dormant in me since the aftermath of September 11. I was becoming a terrorist of comedy. This was my joke madrasa run mostly by Ivy League-educated Jews, and I was being taught how to commit a jihad of irony against the bullshit, the hypocrisy, the ignorance. I was learning to fire missiles of satire across the basic cable airwaves and blow the minds of a million people. Sometimes we even got up to two million if it was election time. I was able to retaliate on behalf of a sector of society that needed to know that someone, kind of, sort of, had the balls that no one on FOX or CNN had. American Muslims, whether they were religious practitioners or whether, like me, they mostly identified with Islam from a cultural standpoint, had not been allowed the luxury of being both patriotic and critical of America at the same time.

  This was evidenced by the brown-faced cabbies on the streets of New York who had adorned their yellow cabs with so much red, white, and blue that they looked like floats in the Fourth of July parade. Anyone with a thick Middle Eastern or South Asian accent quickly replaced Inshallah with God Bless America.

  “Even though on the outside I may look like those that did you harm, I am not one of them,” they were attempting to say. “I get that you are angry and afraid but if we just connect for a moment, you will see that I’m actually Armenian or Sikh or from Poughkeepsie. And if I do happen to be Muslim, I am not that freedom-hating type of Muslim. I believe in peace, and baseball. My blood runs apple pie so you can pass over me. Oh ye angel of freedom, liberty, and ignorant racially-driven outrage, pass over me.”

  Inshall—I mean God Bless America.

  My tenure at The Daily Show started during the decade after September 11 and fear of Muslims was at an all-time high. Politicians and the media seemed to dial the fright, mistrust, and animosity up to a fever pitch to gain votes and ratings. From supposed experts on the mainstream news reporting absurdities like the spelling of the Muslim holiday of Eid written backward spells die, as if Islam was a Led Zeppelin album imbued with backward satanic messages. Or that the definition of jihad has something to do with “death to America,” even though Mohammad (PBUH) was born a thousand years before Columbus and if this was true, it would be the mother of all pre-emptive strikes. Or that ev
eryone in India eats chilled monkey brains for dessert (okay fine, that was from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but honestly it had been bothering me since the mid-eighties). To the coverage of less absurd and more dangerous stuff like the Ground Zero mosque protests or proposals that all young Muslim men’s names be put into a database, as if they were pedophiles, or the fact that mosques were being infiltrated by undercover informants hired by the NYPD to spy on Muslims who had committed the crime of simply being Muslim. My point is, I was never short of a story to pitch.

  I spoke to a woman who was protesting the building of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee because she believed that it was a terrorist training camp. She also said one in five Muslims are terrorists. I told her that amounted to almost three hundred million terrorists. She didn’t balk until I said, “Well, I can’t understand what is taking us so long.”

  I spoke to a young cartoonist who was upset that Marvel was creating a Muslim Batman. When asked why this bothered him, he said, “How can you trust him? He might say he is good but what if he is not?” I felt the need to inform him that Batman was a fictional character in a fictional world created by cartoonists, to which he replied, “. . . exactly, and since there are no Muslims in that fictional world, he shouldn’t be there.” It was impossible to argue with that kind of air-tight logic. I mean impossible.

  I spoke to a panel of New Yorkers who had just watched a parody sitcom we had created based on the idea of a Muslim Cosby show called The Q’usoby Show. One gentleman said he could not believe it was a real family. I asked him how we might make it more real. He thought for a second and then said, “What if they had a terrorist uncle who lived in the basement with a goat? Then it would be more believable.” Like I said, impossible to argue with.

  As the years went by, I can honestly say I began to feel a vague sense of accomplishment by highlighting the absurd and ridiculous. To add fuel to my self-congratulatory fire I was soon being given awards by Muslim organizations for my work. In 2011 I was invited to receive a “Courage in Media” award from the Council on American Islamic Relations. I flew out to California, then got picked up in a limousine and driven to the award show where I was to be honored essentially for making fun of racists and Islamaphobes. As I sat at my table with the other recipients eating my radicchio salad, I got to talking to the young man next to me.