Azis Ansari has made a name for himself. Originally known as "that guy from Human Giant," he has since appeared in bit roles in numerous films like Observe and Report, I Love You, Man and Funny People, not to mention his current gig, starring alongside Amy Poehler on the comedy show Parks and Recreation.
Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening is Aziz's first hour-long special, which is also available in Audio CD form. With this, those who know Aziz primarily as an actor (let's say, me) get a chance to see him in the barest form of comedy: telling jokes. Now I wish my perception of him stayed as an actor only.
My favorite stand-up routines—and concurrently my favorite stand-up comics—tend to involve storytelling. Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Louis CK... The best comics are not just a joke juke box (jouke box?). They relay their experiences (be it real or fabricated), drawing you in with a narrative, and then offer witty opinions or observations about those subjects or experiences, hopefully leaving you with a sense of who they are as a person.
By contrast, Aziz's brand of humor is close to being the opposite. There's a calculated arrogance to his act that seems to be there to confirm that he's only there to play around. He shows signs of his sketch comedy know-how by snapping from one scenario to the next, ending each with a shocker punchline.
A lot of the gags have something to do with Facebook, Google or Craigslist. It cements the 26-year-old Aziz as a comedian of his generation, very much in tune with the tools of his audience. It's not that his set-ups aren't funny, but listening to him recount message board pranks (which he would read from his Blackberry onstage, even going so far as to act out the emoticons), I couldn't help but think that I'd probably laugh more if he had just given me the link. Maybe part of the schtick is that he attempts to re-appropriate internet humor into a more classical setting, but such ironic concept doesn't work when delivered so sincerely and gleefully as if they're actual jokes.
For much of the hour-long performance, it sort of feels like watching someone very enthusiastically read CollegeHumor.com out loud, which is a strange experience indeed.
No doubt the best part of the special is when Aziz relays a story of the time he hung out with Kanye West. Not unlike Charlie Murphy's Hollywood stories, Aziz's account is a highly amusing anecdote that paints Kanye as the comical weirdo celeb; one who replies to texts in super-speed, peeps at naked ladies using a telescope and yells at people in his kitchen for interrupting jokes.
If you're familiar with the movie Funny People, there's also a bizarre sense of identity crisis at work. In that movie, Aziz plays RAAAAAAAANDY (always with eight A's), a rambunctious comic who performs dreadful sex jokes accompanied by pyrotechnic insanity. It's a great character. He's meant to represent a low in stand-up—narcissism coming from using a patronizing, party atmosphere delivery to mask shitty non-jokes. Surely Aziz wants to create the distinction between RAAAAAAAANDY and him?
Except, one particularly memorable routine RAAAAAAANDY performs in the movie is an actual Aziz routine about Coldstone Creamery crackheads, which he performs in this special. In the context of Funny People and the RAAAAAAAANDY concept, it appears deliberately desperate, looking as if he's being hyperactive and silly just to support such a weak material. It's ironically funny. So when it appears on this special, stripped of that self-aware identity, it's no longer satirical. It's just weird—and annoying.
DVD Bonus Features
There's only one extra on the DVD, and that's a bonus, much smaller performance in the Upright Citizens Brigade theater. As Aziz explains, he wanted to include old videos of him performing jokes that didn't make the cut into the special, but he didn't like the way he looked in those videos, so he decided to just film himself performing those jokes.
Strangely enough, I enjoyed this one a bit more than the main feature. Perhaps because the more intimate venue managed to get Aziz to be a little more loose, without the aforementioned arrogance. Here he takes his time with his anecdotes and delivers them casually, and they're all the better for it.
"Aziz Ansari: Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening" is on sale January 19, 2010 and is rated NR. Comedy. Directed by Jason Woliner. Starring Aziz Ansari.
