The highly anticipated season two of Master of None was released on Netflix today, and last night Aziz Ansari talked a little bit about the upcoming season with Seth Meyers. As fans of the show are well aware, Ansari draws on his own real life experiences in writing the series, which features his real-life parents as actors and his brother Aniz as a writer.
Coming from a Muslim family, one of the episodes in season two deals with religion, and Ansari said that Aniz — who is obviously not recognized like his famous brother — used his real world experiences with Islamophobia as inspiration in writing the episode. Not everything made it in however, as Ansari recalled, “So he had some hilarious instances of racist Islamophobic stuff happen that we didn’t get to put in the episode, but I thought I would tell you guys now.” Although he prefaced the stories by admitting, “This is weird, you’re like, this is gonna be funny? It sounds like it’s very mean.”
And yes, Aziz Ansari is in fact one of the few people on this earth who can make Islamophobia hilarious, although — without spoiling anything — one was more of a case of mistaken identity, than anything.
In an earlier segment, the former Parks and Recreation star recalled how he learned to speak fluent Italian while filming season two of Master of None in Italy, and how immediately after production wrapped, he attempted to learn Japanese before going to live in Tokyo for a few months. The only problem being that Japanese is substantially more difficult to learn than Italian, so he made sure to get a few very important phrases down: “What is that?” “Is it delicious?” “Excuse me! Can I have one?” Gotta have priorities.
