Aasif Mandvi’s Biting Take on the Great American Sitcom
When Aasif Mandvi first arrived in New York 30 years ago, the Indian-American actor started climbing the ladder of what he calls “brown-guy roles” – the small supporting gigs he says were available to him off-Broadway, in commercials and on goofy sitcoms. “The first parts are mostly cab drivers and deli owners,” says Mandvi, 49, sitting at his local greasy spoon diner on the Upper West Side. “Then, you graduate to playing doctors, dentists, maybe even an obstetrician. And then,” he says with a grin, “You got to play a terrorist. You know you’ve hit the big time when you grow a beard and say things like ‘Death to America!’ in an Arabic accent. That was all that was open to me.”
A lot has changed since then. Mandvi has gone from spouting one-liners from the front seat of taxis to being one of the most in-demand writers and actors in comedy. For the past nine years, his main gig has been The Daily Show, where he is the “Senior Muslim Correspondent,” pushing the show’s satire into new frontiers amid post-9/11 anxiety and an ever-growing American anti-Muslim bias. This summer, he’ll co-star with Jack Black and Tim Robbins in The Brink, a new HBO comedy about three men working in American foreign relations in the Middle East (think Veep meets Homeland). And he is currently writing a new play about his life for Lincoln Center, commissioned on the success of his memoir, No Land’s Man, in which Mandvi – who was born in Bombay and raised Muslim in Britain and Tampa, Florida – recounts being stuck between cultures all his life.
But Mandvi’s most intriguing project might be his new Web series, Halal in the Family, a mock single-camera sitcom intended to poke fun at Muslim stereotypes and the cultural anxiety some Americans feel about Islamic families and traditions. On the show, Mandvi plays Aasif Qu’osby, the patriarch of the affable Qu’osby family (the Cosby parody is overt, down to the ugly sweaters). The show addresses government spying, cyberbullying of Muslim children and other hot-button issues, while spoofing classic sitcom tropes, including canned laughter and flattened lighting. (It even has a perky theme song, which goes, “We’re just an ordinary family/Living in your town/Don’t worry!/We like monster trucks and football/Even though we’re brown!”)
The idea for Halal in the Family came from a sketch on The Daily Show, after Katie Couric made an offhand remark that Muslim-Americans needed their own version of The Cosby Show in order to diffuse tension and potentially assimilate. The sketch, about a fake sitcom called The Qu’osby Show, went over so well that Mandvi and his cowriters decided to turn it into a series. They launched an IndieGogo campaign to fund the project and shifted the focus — at least title-wise — from Cosby to Archie Bunker. “Bill Cosby got himself into a little bit of hot water,” Mandvi says. “We were like, well, hey it’s only 30 women, maybe this will pass? But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Not for Bill, obviously, but for us.” Mandvi says that changing the title to an All in the Family reference also hammers home the kind of statement he is trying to make — he wants to make people confront their own prejudices and ignorance the way that Archie Bunker once did.