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
Im from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.
I think, you know, a lot of the business of comedy is taking your personal experiences and making them relatable to other people.
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.
I think being funny had something to do with feeling like an outsider, not feeling cool - insecurity.
The whole religion of Islam is based on reward and punishment and reward and punishment, and it becomes a part of how you think of everything. Even yourself.
My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.
When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context.
The worst job I ever had was an office job that I had for six years, and that's nothing against the people who I was surrounded by, because they were wonderful people.
I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.
Honestly, I would love to be friends with Fox Mulder on 'The X-Files.' That's almost a little too obvious, but that would be my answer. I'd love to hang out with him.
Wikipedia is kind of weird. I feel it's lame to put up my own page, but I desperately want someone else to do it.
When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone.
If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.
I stay home. It's the best place to be alone. There is hardly any walk-through traffic.