The flashbacks to Dev’s father’s experience give us a real sense, right off the bat, of just how much things have changed. At Dev’s age, his father was an immigrant starting over in a new country, pursuing medicine in the face of racism, and attempting to provide for the wife his parents had arranged for him to marry, as well as their young son. (There are also lots of laughs and completely bizarre tangents, like Dev’s friendship with a muscle-bound Dwayne Johnson–type costar who is obsessed with his dead cat, baking Cinnabons, and playing with dominoes.)Įarly on we meet Dev’s Indian-born doctor father, played by Ansari’s actual Indian-born doctor father, Shoukath. The story lines often carry real emotional weight. It means each episode feels like a thoughtful, nuanced, multidimensional take on a very relatable conundrum. He has a lot of questions.” Each episode of Master of None lasers in on a different one: Do I really want to have children? How can I relate better to my parents? What makes a first date work? Is marriage sacrosanct? The single-topic focus allows Ansari to, as he told Lopate, give the jokes some breathing room.

The poster for the show reads: “This is Dev. But Ansari and Klinenberg also draw on more standard tools of social science: focus groups, studies, data, surveys, and interviews with experts.Īnsari plays Dev, a 30-year-old working New York actor fully embedded in the stage of life that Modern Romance calls “emerging adulthood” and that we might think of as arrested development. Ansari shares his own experience, both in his relationship with his current girlfriend, chef Courtney McBroom (he’s particularly sweet when recalling their courtship, though he doesn’t use her name), as well as his less successful dating exploits in the past. And this past summer, Ansari took things a step further, at least in the realm of social science, when he collaborated with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg on a book called Modern Romance that explores the nooks and crannies of dating and love in the age of the smartphone. In the past he’s used data analytics to tailor his material to the demographics of his audience. Ansari’s jokes often unfold as elaborately thought-through hypothetical scenarios, a sort of comedic take on the scientific method. And then, of course, he started doing stand-up, and the rest was history.īut not really. Eventually he abandoned science for marketing. As an undergraduate at NYU, the comedian Aziz Ansari, the son of a gastroenterologist and a healthcare worker, initially planned to double major in biology and business.

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