RAAAAAAAANDY!
Maybe you saw him in the first season of Flight of the Conchords as a racist fruit vendor. Or it could have been you caught him on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, or maybe in MTV’s sketch comedy Human Giant. Either way, up-and-comer Aziz Ansari’s been all over the place lately. And what could be my favorite of all his work so far isn’t even “in” anything in the traditional sense. It’s an online promotional spin-off fake documentary series, exploring the comedic process of the character he plays in Funny People, a small-club comedian named Randy.
Randy is everything that’s wrong with stand-up comedy. He’s loud and over-confident, wacky and choreographed, and bases almost his entire set on substanceless sex jokes. Think of a Pakistani, dancing, tongue-in-cheek version of Dane Cook. Then add a DJ named Ol’ Youngin on stage with him for back-up, dropping echoes and “Yeahs!” It really doesn’t get any better than this.
Right now Randy’s site is pretty new. Only the first two parts of the documentary series are up and there are less than 10 videos posted altogether. I know the whole thing was made mostly to plug Funny People, but I kind of hope it blows up and we get to see more in the future. His part in Apatow’s movie is just one of about a million comedian cameos, but here’s money on the table that this is just the beginning of Ansari’s career.
Check out the second part of Randy’s documentary series below and tell me what you think.
And whoa, just before I was about to post this I went to Ansari’s homepage and found a link about a full-length Randy movie in development by Judd Apatow.
What can I say? I know funny.
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 2:50 pm and is filed under film, whatever else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
