“Now I’m older and it’s like,
‘Well, what do I really want to talk about?'” Ansari says.
As the title of his current tour suggests, Ansari wants to explore what it means to be single in the digital age, just as he did on his last stand-up special, the 2013 Netflix-released Buried Alive. But he’s also interested in long-term relationships and marriage—and how Twitter, Facebook, email, texting (and sexting) all play into modern romance.
When it comes to technology, Ansari isn’t just fascinated with how it is affecting people’s romantic relationships. He is also interested in what it is doing to us as a society. According to accounts of his Madison Square Garden set, the comedian had a joke about how exciting it used to be to get a call on a landline phone at home.
In the age of the smartphone, everyone can reach you no matter where you are, he says—the point is driven home by the fact that he is making the observation while talking into a smartphone while simultaneously being chauffeured through the snowy streets of New York. While it wouldn’t be practical to attempt to conduct an interview over text messaging, he notes that many people his age and younger feel it’s a perfectly acceptable way to conduct much of their day-to-day communications.
If your grandmother was having a party, for example, and you didn’t want to come, it used to be that you’d have to talk to her face-to-face or over the phone, and make an excuse. “These days, you can just send a text,” he says. “Sorry grama. I’m not coming.”
It’s the kind of move you might expect from Tom Haverford, Ansari’s fad-obsessed character on Parks and Recreation, a fake documentary-style sitcom about a group of government employees, working at a parks department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana.
Haverford, a sarcastic, mid-level bureaucrat, is obsessed with pop culture and all things material, is constantly glued to his phone and even live-tweeted his own car accident in the show’s fifth season. While the gag might make for funny TV, Ansari says, that constant connectivity is making us all worse—IRL.
That’s not to say Ansari is a Luddite. On the contrary, he is a digital era Millennial and is currently using his Twitter capital to combat Islamophobia by sparring with Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of 21st Century Fox, parent company of Fox News. The comedian first began ripping into Murdoch after the tycoon used his Twitter account to imply that all Muslims were in some way responsible for the recent terror attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper in France. “Maybe most Moslems peaceful,” the 83-year-old billionaire tweeted, “but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.”
Ansari quickly turned Murdoch’s logic inside out. Though the comedian identifies as atheist, he was raised in a Tamil Muslim family, and clearly took offense to the suggestion that his parents were somehow responsible for the actions of a small group of extremist gunmen an entire ocean away. He demanded instructions on how to snuff out the jihadis: “@rupertmurdoch Rups can we get a step by step guide? How can my 60 year old parents in NC help destroy terrorist groups? Plz advize.”
Ansari didn’t stop there. He continued by unleashing a string of tweets implying that the media mogul should be held accountable anytime a Catholic does something unseemly: “@rupertmurdoch You are Catholic, why are you not hunting pedophiles? #RupertsFault”
His hashtag went viral—#RupertsFault is now popping up all over the micro-blogging network, as people blame Murdoch for everything from cold weather and long lines at brunch buffets to the Seahawks’ recent loss in the Super Bowl and the continued existence of the Ku Klux Klan.
