Aziz Ansari has been thinking about the fact that he has been on the road for a long time. Long in two ways, he adds.
“I’ve been doing stand-up for 25 years, although when I say that, it doesn’t even sound right,” he says by phone from an airport in Australia, where his Hypothetical Tour recently took him. (He will record this as a Netflix special later this month.)
But Ansari, who was preparing to fly to Los Angeles for a show at the Dolby Theatre on Wednesday, has also been feeling the effect of this current tour, which actually started 20 months ago, although it was paused twice — once for publicity for “Good Fortune,” his feature film directorial debut, and once to prepare for another film that didn’t end up happening.
At 43, the former “Parks and Recreation” star and “Master of None” co-creator still loves stand-up — more than TV, more than movies — but he finds touring “really exhausting.”
“I can’t run around the way I used to when I was younger,” he says. “I just don’t have the same energy. Also, I’m married and it’s tough being away from my wife.” (The couple lives in London.)
Ansari still gets amped up talking about comedy and was happy to stay on the phone as long as I wanted to … until he said, “Hold on, I lost my boarding pass,” and hurried off the phone to sort out next steps. He called back a few minutes later, admitting he‘d found it in his pocket. Just another day on the road.
And his current tour is what he prefers to discuss, declining to comment on controversies old and new, like past misconduct allegations (he says he’s addressed them in his “Right Now” special) or his more recent stand-up performance in Riyadh and subsequent visit to “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” But the multihyphenate did talk about refining the material in his set, his film work and his appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What keeps you coming back to stand-up?
There’s something so pure about stand-up. I’m really grateful for this art form. Movies can be very frustrating — you’re waiting on financiers and actors to decide what they want to do — but with stand-up, it’s amazing to have an idea and craft it and then to get up and say it to 100 or several thousand people that night and get a reaction.
I’m just grateful people still come out because when you’re younger, you take it for granted, and now there are so many comedians out there, so I’m just happy to get to tour. And I’m really proud of this hour, I think it’s my best one. I’m just better at what I do and I’m a bit smarter as a comedian.
What kind of material are you talking about on this tour?
I’m married now, which I wasn’t on the last tour, and my wife is Danish, and when you get married and are settling in your life, you assess those things in a different way — what does that mean for my culture. In the set, I call myself a “level zero Indian.” I just have the look, but I don’t know anything about Indian history; I know Gandhi and Mindy Kaling and that’s it. And now we’re trying to have kids, and I talk about that in the set but also about trying to pass all this stuff down; my parents cook food from our region, and my wife and I won’t have that so it’s about how I feel about that.
Does it help having fans come out to see your shows now versus having to win audiences over like when you’re starting out?
Actually, my goal is to have people that are skeptical and have to win them over. What’s challenging is you become famous and you lose a little bit of your radar, so you need a crowd that is a bit less warm because then you get a better sense of how to edit your material. I wish I could find someone like Shane Gillis and switch crowds so I perform for his crowd and we just see how our stuff goes over.
You’ve been touring with this show for quite a while. Have you changed your material?
I’m constantly moving things in and out. I’ll come up with some new bits, but also by the time you have a pretty good hour and are touring with it, you get tired of some of the stuff. I’ve seen comedians throw out stuff that’s really good just because they’re tired of it.
It’s important to feel present. If you’re having a good time and not just plowing through the material, that earns you another 20% with the audience. You end up with a much better show.
As I’m getting ready to record my special, I think about what I’m most excited to put out there because a special is different from a live show. At a live show, people won’t leave after 30 minutes, but on Netflix, people will leave five minutes in if you don’t grab them.
Now that you’ve directed “Good Fortune,” do you want to make more movies, or do you want to go back to TV?
I do love movies, but I’ve also had great experiences on TV so I don’t know. I do have these movie scripts I want to get done. Trying to have a stand-up career and put together movies at the same time is difficult and somewhat stupid. And you can’t really plan your life around movies. TV is much more stable than movies.
For TV, I had conversations about doing a “Master of None” season in Japan where Arnold and I would be there for his bachelor party. But when we did the third season, “Moments in Love” it was so different from the first two — I just took away everything people liked about the show, including myself — and I think I should have just called it a different show. So if I wanted to do the Japan story, it would probably be in a new show.
When people ask if there’s going to be another season, I say, “Everything is the show — it’s all me observing my life, whether through the show or stand-up or movies. It’s all put through this lens of my humor, trying to be shot in an artful way.”
Would you ever return to try to complete “Being Mortal,” which got shut down during production because of harassment allegations against Bill Murray?
That movie has so much surrounding it now and it’s such a heavy piece, so I want to make something else first, one of the two other scripts I’ve written, before I even think about it again. But I love the book I adapted it from and I love the story — there’s a lot to it.
Your most recent TV appearance was when you played FBI director Kash Patel on “Saturday Night Live.” How did that happen?
Someone said there was a lot of stuff on the internet about me playing him, and I thought that would be fun. I’m friendly with Colin Jost so I texted him and said, “I’m in town and if you guys are into it, I would be totally down.”
He wrote me back and said he’d talk to Lorne Michaels. And then I didn’t hear from him, so I thought they were doing something else. But that Friday, Colin said, “Lorne loves this. Can you be at the studio at 10:30?”
I asked for pages because I wanted to do a good job and he said, “No, we’re still working on it.” But when I got there, I saw I had quite a bit to do and I got to say, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night.” That was a real pinch-me moment.
The next week I asked if we were doing it again and I didn’t hear back again until Friday. Over time, I got used to the rhythms of the show. I’d love to do it again. It’s a rare dream gig that falls into your lap, and it was such a fun experience.
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