If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.
You can get stuck in the trap of reading your YouTube comments all the time. Sometimes I regret it. Not everyone is going to love you. And for some reason, stand-up has this thing where everyone thinks they can do it. So everyone thinks they're an expert.
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'm 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.
'Four Weddings and a Funeral' is one of my favorite movies, and I laugh all the time, and I cry during the one funeral. But I'll say that 'Monsters, Inc.' is a movie that really gets me super-emotional. Especially the ending.
I grew up watching 'Ghostbusters' and 'Knight Rider' and Hot Wheels commercials. When I got to college, having never set foot in America, I knew more American pop-culture references than my friends did.
I want to be so famous that I'm the pop-culture reference that people would make to try and be racist to me. So I'd be walking down the street, and someone would be, like, 'Hey, look at this Kumail Nanjiani.'
I don't go, 'It is now time to change Americans' perception of Muslims. It's going to be a long day.' I think you just try to be unique and try to be yourself, and if something good comes of that, then great.
I've always played some version of a nerdy guy or something like that. I mean, one of my story lines on 'Silicon Valley' is that I am very bad with women!
I just hope that there's a market for somebody who looks like me as the lead of a rom-com, you know?
I'm still trying to figure out how to have an adult relationship with my parents.
You just don't see Muslims being matter-of-fact Muslim. They're always defined by their Muslim-ness. We're either terrorists, or we're fighting terrorists. I remember seeing 'True Lies' and going, 'Why are we always the bad guys?'
I know a lot of brown actors who play terrorists because they're physically intimidating. For me, it was like, 'O.K., you'll be the nerd.' So I've played the nerd. I've played food-delivery guys. But I always tried to find something in the characters so that they weren't just defined by what they looked like.
A lot of times, it seems like social media has devolved into people just yelling at each other and not really conversing.
I don't want to generalize, but the target audience for a lot of the YouTube people is fairly young - under the age of 16. You still want to know what those people are watching, because I think it's interesting, but sometimes it just makes you feel old.
Populate your life with people different from you. Once you leave school, you get to choose the kinds of people you're going to be around rather than forced to be around them.
I loved the Oscars, and I had V.H.S. tapes for the Oscars, and I used to watch them over and over. There was probably one year where I watched it, like, 20 times or something.
TV requires a lot more patience. No one's ever like, 'I gotta get up at 5 A.M. and write my stand-up!' It's an easy life. With 'Silicon Valley,' it's long hours and very unglamorous.
I know what is funny coming out of my mouth and what is not funny coming out of my mouth. You have to figure out, What is the joke that I can do that nobody else can do?
Most of my exposure to American pop culture was through this weird prism of 'Mad' magazine.
