by Jeff Yang
Born Aasif Hakim Mandviwala in Mumbai, India, Aasif Mandvi broke through as one of the standouts of the Jon Stewart era of The Daily Show, specializing in lampooning xenophobia, immigrant-bashing and anti-Muslim attitudes as the show’s “Chief Brown Correspondent.”
He’s an immigrant twice over: His family emigrated first from India to Bradford, England when Mandvi was just a year old, and then to Tampa, Florida when Mandvi was a teen — according to Mandvi, because his father visited the city and fell in love with the concept of brunch: “There’s so much food here in America that they had to invent a fourth meal to eat it all!”
Most recently, Mandvi published a memoir, No Land’s Man (now available in paperback) and appeared in the HBO comedy series The Brink. He also developedHalal in the Family for the online video site Funny Or Die — a webseries that explodes Islamophobic attitudes by depicting the over-the-top escapades of prime-time’s first-ever Muslim American sitcom family.
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