You may know Aasif Mandvi as the jokester and correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
But if you read his memoir No Man’s Land or see his plays Sakina’s Restaurant and Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom you know he’s much more than that.
Mandvi takes the responsibility of portraying South Asian Americans as no laughing matter.
“There was this idea that I was suddenly representing a sector of society that was being underrepresented in the mainstream media, and speaking about it from a place of…as an immigrant,” Mandvi says in an extensive interview with NY1.
In his play Sakina’s Restaurant he portrays six South Asian characters in a one man show.
“That question is something that I’ve explored in my work for a long time: what is it to be a South Asian man in the west. It’s really what all my work deals with.”
You can watch Mandvi’s rather revealing and quite interesting interview on NY1.
