Today: The Back-Story Of The Box Office Hit Of Summer 2017

Before getting to the post for today, this blogger had a flash when he heard the current occupant of the Oval Office whine after the latest Traitor-fail on national health-care: "My plan now is to allow Obamacare to fail." The flash was that given the idiot's penchant for insulting sobriquets — Crooked Hillary, Pocahontas, Lyin' Ted ad nauseum — the current occupant of the Oval Office shall be forever known in this blog as ... Traitor Trump !! The stupid sumbitch wants to destroy this country and that is treasonous behavior.

Now, to more pleasant things to read and think upon. Back in June 2017, this blogger went to his neighborhood indy movie theater which was one of 10 venues in the country to show "The Big Sick." This blogger gave the flick two-thumbs-up, but was astounded to see in the local fishwrap on July 17, 2017, that among the Top Ten films, in terms of box office receipts, was #5: "The Big Sick." The film was made on a shoestring budget and stood at 5^th in box office receipts. If that is a (fair & balanced) BFD, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
The Best Medicine
By Andrew Marantz


TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing

american apatow around asked audience called character chicago comedian comedy emily family film friends going gordon guy including job joke karachi kazan kumail later life mother movie muslim nanjiani night parents people performed played point political real room scene sick standup started sundance think thought told video watching wearing year

created at TagCrowd.com

In 2009, on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” the comedian Kumail Nanjiani walked onstage, wearing a boxy black suit and a cordless mike, to do a standup set. The band played a few bars of “Born in the USA,” an allusion, presumably, to the fact that he wasn’t. The first anecdote of Nanjiani’s set fell flat. He stood stiffly, swallowing hard, his hands clasped tightly in front of his chest. Then he told a joke about theme-park attractions with excessively convoluted backstories. “It’s like a story line to a porn movie,” he said. “I really don’t care what all your professions are. I’m just here for the ride.” It wasn’t the cleverest punch line in Nanjiani’s act, but it received a big laugh and a ten-second applause break. He exhaled audibly, relaxing his hands. His next bit was about the Cyclone, the rickety roller coaster on Coney Island. “The Cyclone was made in the year 1927! Let that sink in. They should change the name of that ride to 1927, ’cause that fact is way scarier than any cyclone,” he said. “And the whole thing is made of wood . . . you know, that indestructible substance that NASA uses for its space shuttles.” The bit could have been delivered in the nineteen-sixties, by Woody Allen or Mort Sahl, with one exception: Nanjiani said the ride was “the scariest experience of my life—and I grew up in Pakistan.”

Nanjiani spent his childhood in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city. In 1997, when he was nineteen, he left to attend Grinnell College, a small liberal-arts school in the middle of Iowa. “I thought, from watching TV and stuff, that America was one place,” he told me. “They only show you L.A. and New York. They don’t warn you about Iowa.” When he got to college, he says, “I was super shy, but I learned that my friends thought I was funny.” His senior year, there was an open mike on campus, and his friends urged him to try standup. He performed for thirty-five minutes. “I don’t think I’ve ever done better than that crowd, reaction-wise,” he said. “Of course, it was full of people who knew me. But it gave me an irrational amount of confidence.” After school, he moved to Chicago and started performing. Michael Showalter, a comedian and director who has admired Nanjiani from the beginning, told me, “Anyone who saw him saw how smart and fresh his voice was. The question wasn’t whether he’d be successful, only which direction he’d choose to go in.”

The year of the Letterman set, Nanjiani landed a recurring role on “The Colbert Report,” as a Guantánamo detainee who lives under Stephen Colbert’s desk. Many of Nanjiani’s earliest film and TV credits were, he says, “more or less what you’d expect”: “Delivery Guy,” “Cable Guy,” “Pakistani Chef.” But he quickly started getting more substantial roles, and in the past few years he has appeared on almost every show beloved by comedy snobs, including “Portlandia,” “Broad City,” “Community,” “Key & Peele,” and “Inside Amy Schumer.” He now has a lead part on “Silicon Valley,” an ensemble comedy on HBO, playing a coder who, despite his good looks, remains hopelessly unlucky with women. “It’s a version of me in high school, when I was at my least confident,” he said.

As a child, Nanjiani spoke Urdu at home; he learned English at school, and picked up colloquialisms from TV. “I grew up watching ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Knight Rider’ and Hot Wheels commercials,” he said. “When I got to college, having never set foot in America, I knew more American pop-culture references than my friends did.” As a standup, he said, “I was so eager to avoid being known as an immigrant comedian, or as a Muslim comedian, that I would just come out wearing a T-shirt and start talking about video games. I wasn’t judgmental about other comedians using their backgrounds to their advantage—joining the Spicy Masala Comedy Tour, or whatever—but I could never bring myself to do it, even though I could have used the work.”

Then came 9/11. “Suddenly, Islam was the elephant in the room,” he continued. “I just thought, OK, I’m brown, I speak with an accent—I have to at least bring it up.” He began opening his sets by saying, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones,” which put some audiences at ease. Other times, he was interrupted by someone shouting “Go home!” or “Go back to the Taliban!” Recalling one heckler, at a club in Milwaukee, Nanjiani said, “The room got so quiet and awkward. I fumbled around with words and tried to ignore it. It made the audience pity me, which is not a good look for comedy. After that, I came up with something to say—I realized it doesn’t have to be a perfect line, just something to show the audience that you’re still in control.” The next time he was heckled, he responded, “That guy’s right. I am a terrorist. I just do standup comedy on the side, to keep a low profile.”

A similar exchange, with “Taliban” updated to “ISIS,” appears in Nanjiani’s movie “The Big Sick.” It premièred earlier this year, at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was a favorite among both audiences and critics. The movie was directed by Showalter, whose film career has included slapstick cult classics (“Wet Hot American Summer”) as well as offbeat romantic comedies (“Hello, My Name Is Doris”), and produced by Judd Apatow, who has specialized, recently, in helping almost famous comedians adapt their formative experiences into memoiristic meta-comedies. Apatow’s producing partner, Barry Mendel, described “The Big Sick” to me as “part comedy about comedy, part drama about families, part medical mystery, and also, incidentally, a Muslim American rom-com.”

Nanjiani co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Emily V. Gordon, and he plays its protagonist, a standup comic named Kumail. It’s the first feature either of them has written, and it’s Nanjiani’s first starring role. The fictional Kumail works as an Uber [sic, Über] driver, a day job that didn’t exist when the real Kumail still had day jobs. Aside from that, and a few other departures to help a joke land or a plotline cohere, the movie doesn’t stray too far from a dramatically rich series of events that befell Gordon and Nanjiani a decade ago, shortly before they turned thirty.

Nanjiani didn’t conceive of the film as at all political. “It was just supposed to be a heartwarming little movie that, if we did it right, would be funny and maybe a bit poignant,” he said. But it was filmed last summer, when much of the conversation between takes was, inevitably, about the Presidential campaign; the Sundance première was on January 20^th, the day Donald Trump was sworn in. “That coincidence is so weird and terrible that I don’t even know what to make of it,” Nanjiani told me. (On Twitter, where he has more than a million followers, he makes no secret of his political opinions: “I’m thankful our new President-elect is anti-Muslim so now my parents & I agree on politics”; “Silver lining: one day the ocean will take us.”)

Apatow said, “We never talked about it in terms of ‘What does it mean to represent a secular Muslim onscreen?’ We talked about telling Kumail’s story, and that led us, naturally, to questions about family and culture and religion.” The movie, which will be released in June, appears at a time when an individual action can seem unusually freighted with political meaning—when a football player taking a knee during the national anthem or a passenger being dragged from a plane can be transformed, by TV pundits and tweeting politicians, into a national Rorschach test. “I still don’t look at it as a political movie, but I guess now everything is political, whether we like it or not,” Nanjiani told me. “Like that heckling scene, for instance. When we wrote it, the clear assumption was: That guy in the crowd is an asshole, an outlier, and the viewer of the movie is automatically on my side. Now that assholes like that guy have taken over the country, I’m not sure how funny it plays.”

Early in his career, Nanjiani built his act around subjects he thought his American audiences would find relatable. While Louis C.K. and other comedians had success with an expansive, confessional style, he stuck to terse observational jokes about vintage horror movies, the nature of memory, and the pluralization of the word “octopus.” An introvert, he was scared of performing, and he incorporated his fear into a pensive onstage persona. “He would wear loose hoodies, and he was sort of a mumbler,” Pete Holmes, a comedian who started at the same time as Nanjiani and became one of his closest friends, told me. “He was really good, but wordy, subtle—you had to pay attention.”

What Nanjiani avoided mentioning onstage was that he was brought up a strict Shiite Muslim. He was taught that a lustful glance or a sip of wine would result in perpetual torment, and that the Quran was the literal and inerrant word of God; because the Quran didn’t mention dinosaurs, dinosaurs had never existed. When Nanjiani was eight, his mother set aside a cache of jewelry that she planned to give his future wife on their wedding day. It went without saying that Nanjiani’s parents would select this future wife, and that she would be a Pakistani Shiite, possibly a family friend or a cousin. When Nanjiani left for college, his mother made him promise that he would never succumb to Western secularism. A few days later, during Grinnell’s freshman-orientation week, he shook a woman’s hand for the first time.

How could he make this upbringing funny to the tipsy patrons of Joe’s Bar on Weed Street? There would be too many terms to define, too much cultural context to establish in a ten-minute set. Besides, a successful joke requires a clear point of view, and his views were ambivalent and constantly shifting. He associated Karachi with poetry and architecture, violence and misogyny, delicious food, unnerving squalor, and every relative he’d ever loved. Part of him assumed that he would soon move back to Pakistan, and part of him knew that he never would. He couldn’t fully articulate these thoughts to himself, much less to strangers.

By 2006, Nanjiani had been doing standup for five years. He lived with a friend on the North Side of Chicago and worked a day job as an IT specialist. “A really cliché job for a South Asian guy to have, I realize,” he said. “On the other hand, I take some pride in how bad I was at it.” He performed three or four nights a week, around town and on the road. Many comedians, at this point, might have moved to New York or Los Angeles, where they could audition for TV jobs and get noticed by agents. Nanjiani, out of comfort and inertia, stayed in Chicago.

With time, he grew more assured onstage. He trained himself to take the microphone out of the stand and move around—“It sounds like a tiny thing, but it was transformative,” he said—and he changed his hair style from a floppy middle part, à la nineteen-nineties Hugh Grant, to an Elvis pompadour. “He started getting muscly and wearing tight T-shirts,” Holmes said. “He plucked his unibrow. He started getting loud, controlling the room, high energy. It was like watching a car suddenly shift into a higher gear. Instead of calling him Kumail, I started calling him Newmail.”

At one show, in a bar on the North Side, Nanjiani asked, facetiously, “Is Karachi in the house?” Someone in the audience, also facetiously, let out a “Whoo!” Nanjiani could see that she was a white woman, a pretty brunette with a streak of purple in her hair. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I would have noticed you.” Two nights later, they ran into each other again, and she introduced herself as Emily Gordon. She was from North Carolina, and although she was a couples and family therapist, she knew as much about comedy—and video games, and comic books, and horror movies—as he did.

Soon they were texting almost every day. There was an obvious mutual attraction, but neither was interested in a relationship: Gordon, who was twenty-seven, had already been married and divorced; Nanjiani, then twenty-eight, wasn’t supposed to be dating anyone, much less a non-Muslim. “We’d hang out, hook up, and then be, like, ‘We can’t do this anymore. But let’s hang out again,’ ” Nanjiani said. “Once, before she came over to watch a movie, I threw a bunch of dirty laundry on my bed, to insure that nothing would happen. It didn’t work.”

Meanwhile, Nanjiani’s parents, who had moved from Karachi to New Jersey, were sending him information about eligible Shiite bachelorettes in the Chicago area. He avoided meeting the women. “My American friends would be, like, ‘Dude, just tell your parents you’re not interested,’ ” he said. “But that’s a misunderstanding of the culture. Arranged marriage is marriage. Anything else is unthinkable.” He felt American enough to want to choose his romantic partners, but Pakistani enough that he dreaded flouting his family’s expectations. “I couldn’t imagine a universe where I ended up accepting an arranged marriage, but I also couldn’t imagine telling my parents that,” he said. “So I just deflected and delayed.”

One day, after Nanjiani and Gordon had been dating for a few months, she texted him to say that she was going to the doctor. Nanjiani didn’t hear from her for several hours. Around midnight, he got a call: Gordon was in the emergency room, and she was having trouble breathing. He rushed to the hospital and spent the night. By the next morning, Gordon was heavily sedated and was drifting in and out of wakefulness. Her lung was infected, and the infection was spreading fast. In order to treat it, the doctors told Nanjiani, they needed to put her into a medically induced coma. They asked if he was her husband. He said no—he wasn’t even sure that he was her boyfriend. They asked again, pressing him to sign a release form. Finally, at the doctors’ insistence, he signed it. The doctors tied Gordon down and injected her with an anesthetic. She thrashed against the restraints, then fell into a coma.

Nanjiani was supposed to go on the road to open for Zach Galifianakis, but he stayed in Chicago and visited Gordon in the ICU every day. She remained in the coma for more than a week while the doctors ruled out several possibilities, including HIV and leukemia. Even a decade later, after having recounted the experience dozens of times, Nanjiani still chokes up whenever he talks about it. “I was sitting by her bed,” he said. “She was unconscious, and she was hooked up to all these beeping machines, and I very clearly remember thinking, If she makes it out of this, I’m gonna marry her.” His voice caught. “I know that sounds cliché, and it’s actually kind of creepy and nonconsensual if you think about it too hard. But that was the thought I had.”

“Spoiler alert—I made it,” Gordon said, last May, flashing me a thumbs-up and a goofy smile. On the eighth day of her coma, she received a diagnosis of adult-onset Still’s disease, a rare inflammatory syndrome that is manageable once it’s identified and treated. “I have to sleep the right amount and exercise the right amount, and I still occasionally get flare-ups and have to stay in bed for a few days,” she told me. “But no more ICUs, which is pretty fucking sweet. Now I only have to go to the hospital when we’re filming a movie in one.”

As a co-writer of “The Big Sick,” Gordon was on set every day of the shoot, which took place in New York, last spring. She and Nanjiani now own a house in Los Angeles, but during the shoot they rented an Airbnb in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The first time I met Gordon, she was sitting in a canvas director’s chair in front of a video monitor, a pair of headphones slung around her neck. Next to her were Mendel, the producer, and Showalter, the director. We were in an art space in Williamsburg that had been decorated to look like the fictional Kumail’s bachelor apartment in Chicago: an Xbox, an inflatable mattress, a family-sized box of Cheerios. Between shots, Zoe Kazan, who played the fictional Emily, sat next to the real Emily, and they chatted about which books they were reading. At one point, Kazan turned to me and said, “You know the first grader who has this cool third-grade cousin, and she just thinks her big cousin hung the moon? That’s how I feel about her, essentially.”

Kazan swung her feet in the air and squinted at shoes the costume designer had selected, a pair of gray ballet flats. “Are these shoes you would actually wear?” she asked Gordon.

Without speaking, Gordon gestured toward her own feet: gray ballet flats.

“Fair enough,” Kazan said.

When the crew was ready, Showalter called for quiet, and those of us sitting in front of the monitors put on headphones. Kazan went into an adjacent room, and she and Nanjiani started filming the next scene: the couple’s first fight. At this point in the movie, their relationship seems promising, but Kumail has been avoiding some traditional landmarks of commitment, such as introducing Emily to his parents. In the scene, Emily, rummaging in Kumail’s bedroom, finds a cigar box full of photos—the Pakistani bachelorettes his mother has been attempting to set him up with. Emily starts to ask questions, including, “Can you imagine a world in which we end up together?” The emotional climax of the scene is Kumail’s inadequate response.

“Finding a literal box of photos—that’s cinematic license,” Gordon told me. “That said, the themes are obviously drawn from reality. And it’s extremely accurate to our actual conflict styles, to the point where it’s almost eerie to watch. His body responds to conflict by basically shutting down and going to sleep. Which, of course, makes me fly into a fucking rage.” When I took off my headphones, Kazan’s voice pierced through the walls, whereas Nanjiani’s was, for much of the scene, an inaudible murmur; in the video monitor, Kazan paced and gesticulated while Nanjiani leaned wearily against a doorpost, his eyes Stygian pools. In Nanjiani’s comic performances, on “Silicon Valley” and elsewhere, he has demonstrated onscreen magnetism and authenticity. Here, he showed that he could anchor a tense scene, full of long pauses and light on comic relief.

They filmed the argument several more times, improvising variations on the written dialogue. (Kazan: “Are you judging ‘Pakistan’s Next Top Model’ or something?” Nanjiani: “You know that’s not an actual franchise.”) Before each take, Showalter urged Nanjiani to speak more directly, sounding out the line between candor and cruelty. At the end of one take, Nanjiani said, in a near-whisper, “We’ve only been dating for five months, Emily. I think you’re overreacting.”

“Harsh,” Mendel, at the video monitors, said.

“Fuck you, Kumail,” Gordon said. “Character Kumail, I mean.”

Because shooting had begun in the late morning and would end around midnight, they broke for “lunch” at 5 p.m. Nanjiani, Gordon, and Kazan decided to walk to a vegan Asian-fusion restaurant nearby. On the way, they passed a trailer where the props department was preparing for an upcoming dinner scene; they had ordered from a Pakistani kebab house in Queens, and were deciding which foods would look best on camera. Kumail tasted the biryani and the haleem, a thick wheat stew. “This is the real deal,” he said. “You guys might also want to get some barfi. It’s a milk-and-sugar thing, a dessert.”

“Barfi?” a production designer asked, writing down the word.

“ ‘Barf,’ with an ‘i,’ ” Nanjiani said.

They continued walking to the restaurant. “The prop guys have been great on this,” Kazan said. “Even the books in my apartment are on point.”

Nanjiani nodded. “On other stuff I’ve done, there were always monkeys and elephants and Buddhas and Arabic script—just every possible brown-person thing.”

The next scene on the shooting schedule was one that took place earlier in the movie—a makeout scene. After lunch, Kazan and Nanjiani, preparing to simulate a Chicago winter, put on bulky sweaters, which would come off in the course of the action. “I think your stubble looks awesome, but you are going to scratch the shit out of my face,” Kazan said.

In a discussion the previous night, Kumail and the two Emilys had decided that, during the filming of this scene, Gordon would leave the set. “Zoe doesn’t think it’s weird if I’m here, and I don’t think it’s weird if I’m here, but Kumail does,” Gordon said.

“I’m sorry,” Nanjiani said.

“Dude, whatever makes it easier for you is fine with me,” Gordon said, gathering her things. “Now I get to go home, nap, maybe play some video games. I wish my husband would make out with other women every day!”

When Gordon was in the coma in Chicago, Nanjiani spent the first few days evading his parents’ calls. One night, he picked up the phone and admitted that he had a girlfriend, that she was an American and a non-Muslim, and that she was very ill. “I was too exhausted to keep lying,” he said. He assumed that his mother would be furious, “but she kept it together. Every day, she’d go, ‘Is Emily OK?’ Then, one day, the answer was yes, and she immediately switched to ‘How could you do this to us?’ ”

Gordon left the hospital in May of 2007. She and Nanjiani were married that July, at Chicago’s City Hall, with six friends as witnesses. Two weeks later, his parents hosted a Muslim wedding in New Jersey. The cleric, in a reverse-xenophobic gesture, refused to perform the ceremony for anyone with a non-Muslim name, so Gordon went by Iman for the day. “I think that the ceremony was my mom’s way of saying to Emily, Even though you’re not the bride I imagined, I’m trying my best to include you in the family,” Nanjiani said. Shabana, Nanjiani’s mother, told me that when she first learned about Emily, “I was a bit disappointed, I admit. But later I came to love her like a daughter.” On the day of the Muslim wedding, Shabana gave Gordon the cache of jewelry she had been saving for the occasion.

Nanjiani, having crossed one boundary by marrying Gordon, started to cross others. In the spring and summer of 2007, he wrote a ninety-minute one-man show about his personal relationship to Islam. He performed it at the Lakeshore Theatre, an august venue in Chicago that has since closed. In the only extant recording of the show, a low-resolution video of the opening-night performance, the theatre’s artistic director introduces Nanjiani by saying, “We’ve had a lot of great shows over the past few months, since we set out to become a Mecca of comedy as art—we’ve had Patton Oswalt, Janeane Garofalo, Maria Bamford, Louis C.K. None of them have been as exciting to me as what you’re about to see tonight.” The Mecca pun seemed to be unintentional.

The show was called “Unpronounceable,” after Nanjiani’s first conversation on American soil, with the customs agent who took his passport. (“He said, ‘Welcome to America, Mr. . . . this is unpronounceable.’ Not ‘I can’t pronounce that’ or ‘How do you pronounce that?’ Unpronounceable.”) These days, Nanjiani describes the show in self-deprecating terms, and “The Big Sick” includes a cringe-inducing sendup of a cheesy one-man show. If a few moments in “Unpronounceable” smacked of juvenilia—an overwrought description of a falling snowflake, for example—the writing, on the whole, was heartfelt and trenchant, even when tackling such difficult topics as crises of faith and the tradition of public self-flagellation. The show was a hit, and it allowed Nanjiani to sign with a prominent agent and quit his IT job. That October, five months after Gordon left the hospital, she and Nanjiani moved to New York. “It’s not like we ever turned to each other and said, ‘Life is fleeting, let’s take our shot,’ ” Nanjiani said. “But, in hindsight, Emily getting sick was clearly a big event that spurred us to examine our priorities.”

Gordon eventually stopped practicing therapy, and she and Nanjiani moved to Los Angeles and started to collaborate. They co-hosted “The Indoor Kids,” a podcast about video games, and, with the comedian Jonah Ray, founded a weekly standup showcase called “The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail,” which featured a rotating stable of performers curated by Gordon. From 2010 to 2016, the show took place every Wednesday, in a small black-box theatre in the back of a comic-book store on Sunset Boulevard—the heart of the heart of cool-nerd culture. During a trip to LA last year, I happened to catch the last-ever night of “The Meltdown,” which featured standup by Apatow and a performance by a satirical pro-Trump reggae band. After the show, Nanjiani and Gordon stayed for nearly an hour, greeting and hugging several members of the audience.

Gordon has written personal essays, advice columns, and a cheeky self-help book, Super You: Release Your Inner Superhero (2015). She also spends much of her free time dispensing advice. Most of her friends in LA are comedians, and comedians tend to be, as she puts it, “wonderful, kindhearted individuals who sometimes have no fucking clue how to live like grownups.” A few of her friends have compared her to Wendy among the Lost Boys.

In 2013, Nanjiani filmed an hour-long standup special in Austin, Texas. This time, he chose his own walk-on music: a rap song built around a Bollywood sample. In the special, “Beta Male,” he strides across the stage, projecting swagger even as he jokes about being a coward or a creep. The act is inflected with anecdotes about his upbringing. Once, when he was twelve, he was watching a forbidden videotape, and, during one of his neighborhood’s frequent power outages, it got stuck in the VCR. He imagines running away in shame and having to fend for himself: “Any work needs doing? I can beat Mario and draw a Ninja Turtle.”

At one point during the performance, it became clear that a woman in the audience was from Karachi.
“How’s Karachi doing?” Nanjiani asked her, from the stage. (He has not been back to Pakistan since college.)

“Same as ever,” she said.

“Mostly on fire?” he asked, not without affection.

In 2012, Nanjiani performed at South by Southwest, where he met Apatow. “He started telling me about that time in his life, in Chicago,” Apatow said. “I went, ‘That should be a movie.’ ” This led to a series of meetings, which led to a series of e-mails, which led to drafts of a screenplay, which, four years later, became “The Big Sick.”

The scenes in Kumail’s parents’ house were shot in Douglaston, Long Island. One day last summer, as the crew dusted the front lawn with fake snow, Nanjiani, Gordon, and Showalter sat in the living room, alternating between nimble banter and earnest discussions of gun-control policy. Mendel, the producer, sat in front of a video monitor in the back yard; the house’s owners had cats, and Mendel was severely allergic.

“For Emily’s parents, we went through a normal casting process,” Nanjiani said. The roles went to Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. “When we were going to cast my parents, I called my dad and asked, ‘Who should play you?’ and he answered right away: Anupam Kher.” Kher has been a Bollywood star for decades; “The Big Sick” was, by his count, his five-hundredth film. While Kher was filming in Douglaston, Nanjiani’s parents insisted on visiting the set, a prospect that made Nanjiani palpably nervous. “The real world and the world of the movie are not supposed to be this close together,” he said, stepping outside and pacing around the back yard. “There are things that come up in the script that my parents and I haven’t talked about yet.” Earlier that day, they’d filmed a scene in which Kumail’s mother asks him to go into another room and pray before lunch. Kumail unfurls a prayer rug and sets a timer on his phone; five minutes later, after watching a video and playing with a cricket bat, he rolls up the rug and leaves the room.

Nanjiani’s parents arrived on set and made small talk with Kher. “Doesn’t he look like my separated-at-birth twin brother?” Nanjiani’s father, Aijaz, joked. They posed for photos, and Nanjiani’s parents left after about ten minutes. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” a crew member asked Nanjiani.

Later, I asked him how his relationship with his parents had progressed in the years since the wedding. “It’s a process,” he said. “I think it’s good. They love Emily. We see them a lot. It’s complicated.” He gathered his thoughts. “In the movie, the Kumail character and his parents are on step one of figuring all that stuff out. In real life, we’re on step four or five. I don’t know how many steps there are.”

When the fictional Emily falls into a coma, the fictional Kumail doesn’t know how to contact her parents. To find their phone number, he has to gain access to Emily’s iPhone. He sits next to her hospital bed and whispers, “Sorry”; then he places her inert thumb on the phone’s touch pad, unlocking the screen. Reading that moment in the screenplay, I worried that it might seem inauthentic, like something that would happen in a movie but not in real life. When I saw it at Sundance, sitting among eleven hundred people in a sold-out auditorium, the moment landed. From the opening credits onward, the audience was in the film’s thrall. After Kumail is interrupted by the racist heckler, Emily’s mother shuts the heckler down; her monologue received a spontaneous mid-scene round of applause. Emily’s father, eating lunch with Kumail for the first time, leads with an offensive icebreaker: “9/11 . . . What’s your stance?” Kumail’s acerbic response—“It was a tragedy. I mean, we lost nineteen of our best guys”—resulted in waves of cathartic laughter.

After the Sundance première, Gordon posted on Instagram, “We just showed our movie for the first time. 1000 emotions.” The next day, standing on the snowy main drag of Park City, Utah, I asked her to describe a couple of them. “Euphoric?” she said. “Shell-shocked? Is nausea an emotion? When the end credits rolled and people started clapping, I had tears in my eyes, and I literally reached down as if to unbuckle my seat belt. Like, my brain was taking the roller-coaster metaphor too literally.” She elbowed Nanjiani. “He was stoic, as usual.”

“I was overwhelmed!” he said. “That’s how I process emotions.”

Within a day, Amazon had bought the movie for twelve million dollars, one of the most lucrative deals in Sundance history. (At the previous year’s festival, Amazon spent ten million dollars on “Manchester by the Sea.”) From then on, walking around Park City with Nanjiani was like trailing a groom at his wedding reception. Heads turned when he entered a room; people he’d never met greeted him with handshakes and hugs. His parents had been texting him, thrilled by his success. “They haven’t seen the movie yet,” he said, tentatively. “They’re gonna like it, though. I think they’re gonna like it.” When I spoke with his parents, in April, they still hadn’t seen it. “But we have kept up with the reviews and everything,” Nanjiani’s father said. “Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter—I have not seen a single negative review!”

At Sundance, Nanjiani arrived at the Filmmaker Lodge, a venue with rustic wood panelling and moose heads mounted on the walls, to speak on a two-person panel with the actor John Cho. The interviewer noted that both men were born abroad (Cho is from South Korea), and asked whether they’d felt the burden of “being the representative of an entire group of people.”

“First, I wanna say that when I started doing standup comedy people were racist to me, and they would call me Kumar, so I’m sure this is very confusing,” Nanjiani said. He was referring to the 2004 comedy “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” about an Indian-American and a Korean-American embarking on a series of stoned adventures, which was one of the highest-grossing Hollywood movies without a white actor in a lead role. Although Nanjiani didn’t appear in the movie, strangers called him “Kumar” so often that he wrote a joke about it. In Nanjiani’s 2013 standup special, he said, “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. Oh, fuck, that is Kumail Nanjiani!’ ”

Cho actually did appear in “Harold and Kumar”—he played Harold. The audience laughed, and then Nanjiani addressed the question sincerely. “I don’t go, ‘It is now time to change Americans’ perception of Muslims. It’s going to be a long day,’ ” he said. “I think you just try to be unique and try to be yourself, and if something good comes of that then great.” On “Silicon Valley,” for example, Nanjiani’s character fulfills some stereotypes and subverts others. He is unfashionable but insists on wearing a gold chain, for which he is roundly mocked; he’s a naturalized American citizen whose nemesis, a white coder from Canada, is an undocumented immigrant. “That chain idea came directly from Kumail’s life,” Alec Berg, a co-showrunner of “Silicon Valley,” told me. “So did the details of what it’s like to apply for an American visa. It’s such a luxury, when you’re trying to write a character that feels grounded in reality, to be able to avoid drawing on stereotypes and instead just take Kumail out to lunch and say, ‘Tell me about your life.’ ”

After the panel, in the greenroom, Nanjiani expanded on his thoughts about representation. “People use these words so much that they can start to sound meaningless,” he said. “But I believe it matters. The stories you see as a kid show you what’s possible. I mean, I’m almost forty, and when I saw a brown guy kicking ass in the new ‘Star Wars’ movie I started crying in the movie theatre.”

He went on, “Everyone knows what a secular Jew looks like. Everyone knows what a lapsed Catholic looks like. That’s all over pop culture. But there are very few Muslim characters who aren’t terrorists, who aren’t even going to a mosque, who are just people with complicated backstories who do normal things. Obviously, terrorism is an important subject to tackle. But we also need Muslim characters who, like, go to Six Flags and eat ice cream.” # # #

[Andrew Marantz is a Writer/Editor at The New Yorker. In addition to The New Yorker, his articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Men's Journal and Harper's magazine. Marantz was a Royce Fellow at Brown University where he received a BA (religious studies and literary arts) and he received an MA (journalism) from New York University.]

Copyright © 2017 The New Yorker/Condé Nast Digital




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2017 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves