Kumail Nanjiani
Kumail Nanjiani
Kumail Nanjianiis a Pakistani-American stand-up comedian, actor and podcast host. Nanjiani is best known for his role as a main cast member on every season of HBO's Emmy Award-nominated series Silicon Valley, as well as for providing the voice of Prismo on the Emmy Award-winning animated series Adventure Time. In addition he's starred on the TNT series Franklin & Bash and the Adult Swim series Newsreaders. He also co-hosts the Comedy Central show The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail. In...
NationalityPakistani
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth21 February 1978
CityKarachi, Pakistan
CountryPakistan
I moved to New York first and was really apprehensive about moving to L.A., but I really, really like it.
I never really got into game shows. The easiest one is Wheel Of Fortune because you just have to know words, and for the most part everyone knows words.
I would say I try to make my comedy really personal. I try to tell stories that happened to me, experiences from my life.
I was on this path to becoming a computer-science guy, but I didn't like it. I got no joy from it. It was very, very scary. It was suffocating to think that I was just going to do this thing for the rest of my life.
Philosophy is problem-solving. There's a philosophical problem, and then you try to solve it by approaching it from different angles and seeing what way works. That's what comedy is: you have a topic and you try to just hit it as many different ways as you can.
I love constructive criticism. I love getting notes when I'm acting. I love them telling me what to do. I don't always agree with it, but I really need it.
Just because you saw a vampire doesn't mean that a snowman or a Loch Ness Monster also exists.
I thought of America as this crazy, happy, exciting place where everybody's rich and there's stuff everywhere. Compared to Pakistan, it's not untrue.
Living in Pakistan, you didn't have a sense of how huge and varied America was, geographically.
It's not like I listened to music and then stopped. I still don't have a real appreciation for music because I didn't really start listening to it until my 20s.
I was extremely shy and had a terrible fear of public speaking. But I had fallen in love with stand-up.
The plan was always to come to America, because Pakistan's a scary place. They don't have religious freedom. It's very poor, and there's a lot of violence and corruption.
It wasn't until I moved to New York that I decided to make a conscious effort to be myself.
On stage I just have to be myself. In acting you have to be so many other people.