Aziz Ansari and the Normalization of Black Parody in America
Aziz Ansari and I are from the same era, and about the same age — we’re in our mid-30s — so we were both influenced by 90s/00s, and some 80s, Hip-Hop and R&B. But he’s Indian-American (Asian) raised in the South and I’m African-American (literally) raised up North. This distinction, as it turns out, has some significance to his comedy and persona, and my substantive (non-personal) gripe. His recent stand-up comedy special Brooklyn debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was reflective, sardonic, and political, but notably belabored on “Blackness.” Through his mostly seated-on-a-bar-stool performance, Aziz correctly uses race and racism as connecting threads to air out a myriad of issues plaguing American society, but his heavy-handed return to Black punditry, casuistry, and hyperbole often lands awkwardly — even for an almost all white crowd. The tour’s theme Road to Nowhere for Aziz is a strange amalgam of African-American parody incorporated with Nietzschean and corporatist ideologies, wherein he attempts to justify and reconcile human frailty in a “godless” world with neoliberal remedies. The tour’s title also calls to mind a similarly named “Road To Nowhere” song from Ozzy Osbourne’s quadruple-selling No More Tears record.
I was looking back on my life
And all the things I’ve done to me
I’m still looking for the answers
And I’m still searching for the key
The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me
It just won’t leave me alone
I still find it all a mystery
Could it be a dream?
The road to nowhere leads to me
Through all the happiness and sorrow
I guess I’d do it all again
Live for today and not tomorrow
It’s still the road that never ends
In Aziz’s journey to nowhere, there are winners and losers: comedians and paying audiences, Netflix endorsement deals and corrupt content, “shitty” people and people that get “shitted” on. Lastly, there are whites and Blacks.
Aziz seems to evince the inevitability of American capitalism en route to nihilism through his performance to, perhaps, massage his early 2018 public sexual indiscretions, as reported by Vanity Fair. In doing so, he capitalizes on the Black experience to garner a few laughs, a stack of shekels and, perhaps, some sympathy — if not forgiveness — from his fans. In Brooklyn, Aziz and the nowhere train is successful on all accounts. The sold-out crowd stands to ovation after his toned-down, somber final stanza, recounting the “shittiness” of humanity and his “reckoning” with #MeToo, though nowhere do we actually hear an apology. What we do hear for the preceding hour-long set is a relentless, if funny, commentary on Black social and popular culture.
Aziz begins his piece with redemptive-esque “woke” vignettes — targeted to culturally fastidious white women, albeit — and continues to contemporaneously release a steady dose of Black stereotypes and Africana innuendo for what appears to be a deflection of his own TimesUp! sexual picadillo. In 2018, Aziz was accused of sexual misconduct by a white woman that he met at a Hollywood event. Weeks later he, supposedly, took her out to a fancy restaurant for a hurried dinner, followed by an Uber ride to his New York City apartment to, ostensibly, have sex with her. She fooled around with him but was not about to “give it up” on the first night. But Aziz, apparently, kept pushing. Evidently the unknown and unnamed woman left in a palm full of tears before things escalated beyond sexual misconduct. Sadly, actions such as Aziz’s untoward behavior and the woman’s alleged sexual charges had theretofore been normalized in American society — wrongfully so, of course; but in the context of Harvey Weinstein and the “ubiquity of sexual harassment, assault and rape,” it was bound to draw much public ire and consternation.
Aziz has been a fan favorite for idyllic comedy since Parks and Recreation and, more recently, his award-winning Master of None series. So this scandal hurt his image and threatened his eighteen-million-dollar portfolio. But this “serious crisis” was also an opportunity that, former White House chief of staff and Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, famously stated to the Wall Street Journal: “should never go to waste.” Thus on the “going nowhere” tour in Brooklyn, Aziz uses the black pastiche to square his insecurities of being a brown Indian-American with a sexual proclivity for white defenseless women. He further disassociates himself from the browner likes of R. Kelly and Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson through an assortment of imprecations — all the while, consciously or inadvertently, aligning himself with the American patriarchal capitalist structure that happens to be Caucasian in hue and masculine in gender. Indeed, Aziz seems to be the kind of guy who says “nigga” among his Indian and white friends because of his assumed earned Black social capital by way of his affiliation with Kanye West et. al. After all, how many of us Black people get an invite to Puffy’s kilt-wearing and silk-laden panties parties in the Hamptons? But that, of course, is subjective conjecture supported only by his BAM performance and what was suggested to have occurred at his New York loft by an unknown white woman (i.e., brown-to-black hyper-masculine sexual tropes).
From time to time during his set, however, Aziz brilliantly explores the existential forms of racism inflicted upon Asians: “The British are back and they need to see your papers!” he retells of an experience with his grandmother, who has Alzheimer's, and keeps pestering him about his white girlfriend’s ominous presence, given that she joined him on his homecoming trip to India. Aziz also reveals that he went to a virtually all white school, and was in a class with one other minority: an Asian girl, presumably, from South Korean with the surname, Lee. Still, these non-Black punchlines are few and far between. And judging from his formative dearth of exposure to Black people — outside BET’s “The Basement” and MTV’s “TRL” — he could very well be as far removed from the culture as Bobby Lapointe. Yet on stage, and in the “Da” “Very Black” “Republic of Brooklyn,” as Spike Lee has dubbed it, he embraces the role of pontificator-in-chief and arbiter of comedic Black culture. It borders obsession. Could those colorful jokes and diatribes, perhaps, be agenda-driven, as in politically motivated? Or is just a valiant deflection tactic for his questionable “shitty” behavior with women from his past? Or, maybe, it’s all just unscripted, random comedy that we should take at face value. The evidence seems to suggest its the former two hypotheses, with a dash of the latter.
For his usually worthy self-deprecating humor is turned into Black-deprecating moments with the flat effect comparable to Tracy Morgan and Alec Baldwin’s demure character’s in the otherwise entertaining “30 Rock” sit-com. Aziz’s Black-bits are chuckle worthy, cumbersome, but ultimately just “meh” in Larry David speak; at most, his Black humor is mildly offensive — more so because it’s predictable and easy. His foray into the world of the word “niggardly”, for example, which is a late fourteenth-century term of French-Scandinavian etymology, that stands for “mean,” “stingy,” “penurious,” is playground juvenile. He describes how U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio apparently said “niggardly” numerous times at a Senate hearing, to the chagrin of his colleagues who evidently didn’t appreciate its contemporary usage. This imaginary or real tale of Sherrod Brown, which Aziz also points out is a “Black-sounding” name to extend the pun, and his use of the term “niggardliness,” draws gregarious laughs from the crowd, though adds up to a little more than a 7th grade English lesson, right along with “hillbilly” and “gammon.” Most of the audience, nonetheless, seemed ignorant of its definition — they giggled more so at its syncopation and homophonic assertion: “Nigga-rd-liness.” Nor could they look it up on Google, since all our cellphones were sealed so that Aziz could record, market, and monetize the tour and upcoming Netflix special ad nauseam. The bit was not nearly funny for me mostly because I knew its definition. I had come across the word years ago in one of the most published and translated women writer’s work. And her usage of the term was certainly more apt in the nineteenth-century context than in Brooklyn in 2019.
To be fair, Aziz as a comedian with all the constitutional liberties of free speech, even so-called “hurtful speech,” does not transgress by ridiculing Blacks and racism or (covertly) relegating #MeToo and TimesUp! Unfortunately, neither does he progress any of these conversations. His goal, then, is singular: jump around these issues in a transcendental and corporatist manner in an effort to make us believe that he has actually reformed his thinking and lifestyle. But like Jay-Z, we don’t believe him: “you need more people.”
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