Clip It: Each day, Jon Davis looks at the world of trailers, featurettes, and clips and puts it all in perspective.
Let me tell you something, one of my jobs here at Hitfix is (was) to watch trailers. I've seen a bunch of comedy trailers the last couple of months. They all have Kumail Nanjiani in them. I'm serious. All of them. Fist Fight. Brother Nature. The Late Bloomer. Flock of Dudes. The Dude-Bro Crusade. I made up that last one.
I love Kumail. He's the master of deadpan as Dinesh in the great Silicon Valley HBO series and all around funny person. He kills it in just about everything he's in. He's often on the podcast Harmontown (featuring Community auteur Dan Harmon), he's got an active Twitter account, he's in that Nerdist scene with Chris Hardwick. It's time just to give him his own movie.
He's like Nikki Minaj. She used to be on other people's albums, and often the song she did her thing on was the best one. Everyone was like, “Where's her big studio album?” And then it came, and it was good not great, but that's beside the point. Instead of sending Kumail to 19 different sets a month to do all these little parts, we should send him to one movie set and do one big part!
Is he leading man material? Yes. Of course, he is. I mean, first of all, Rob Schneider was once leading man material. But that's not fair; he's more appealing than all that. Ask my wife, who happened to sit down with me while I was watching him on Portlandia the other day, and she said, “He's cute and funny.” My wife is a normal person who enjoys the yoga and is not a “comedy nerd” or “comic book nerd” and thinks Matt Damon is attractive. Her taste isn't out there. She's not following Crispin Glover around. So if she says, he's cute, he's not offbeat cute, he's regular cute. Hence, leading man. Hence, give him his own movie.
It's time, people! Thank you!