Last year, Ansari performed at Carnegie Hall, a pretty great whoa-look-at-me-now moment for a guy from Bennettsville, S.C. — “where the idea of saying you wanted to be an actor or something would be so ludicrous,” he says — who got his start doing open-mike nights at almost-empty clubs. Those gigs helped him escape his I-Bank-obsessed classmates at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “All the kids were horrible people who were obsessed with working at Goldman Sachs,” Ansari says.
Soon he was co-writing and co-starring on the cult-favorite MTV sketch show, “Human Giant,” and he recently found himself on Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30” list, a roster of rising talent that can often double as a who’s who of the next decade’s superstars.
But there are still some things that scare Aziz Ansari. Like, really, really scare him. Which is exactly where “Buried Alive” came from: “The idea that people I know are getting married and having babies and how scared I would be to have a baby . . . [and] I’m not ready to get married, either. I guess because I’m 30, I have to pick one person to stay with for the rest of my life?”
Turns out he’s not alone. “I just started talking about that, and it seemed to strike a chord with people,” Ansari says.
There are “two kinds of laughs,” he says. “One is that funny ‘ha-ha’ laugh. But there’s another kind of laugh [from] talking about these deeper things: getting scared of getting married or having kids, where someone will laugh and they’ll also be like: ‘Oh my God, thank you for saying that! I went through the same thing.’ It seems like you hit people on a deeper level.”
So here we are, the most advanced humans in the history of mankind, and we are panicked to the point of paralysis at the mere thought of Grown-Up Things. Marriage makes us shudder; babies send us into spasms. We can barely craft a text message without consulting every friend in spitting distance.
We have never had so much and known so little. It’s kind of a tragedy — or, more accurately, it’s a kind of tragedy from which a person could mine a great deal of comedy.
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