Recap Aziz Ansari at the Pabst Theater

It was fitting that comedian Aziz Ansari would storm the stage of the Pabst Theater for the first of two shows on Friday to Kanye West’s latest blog-burner “Power.” After all, whether Ansari is playing club-hopping socialite Tom Haverford on Parks And Recreation, working on a collaborative mixtape with TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek, or hosting the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, the 27-year-old comic is backstroking on the waves of modern pop culture.

Wearing what looked like a $3,000 suit, Ansari wasted no time telling the crowd that he had recently became single to massive roars of approval from female attendees. “Shut up!” he shouted back, “You don’t mean that shit!” Ansari riffed that his desperation with women has led him to texting his ex-girlfriend things like, “Hey boo, really miss those titties. Wanna meet up?”

Ansari’s self-deprecating rants on “getting chubby” and how women are “mean as shit” to him drew plenty of laughs, but some of the evening’s funniest moments came at the expense of other celebrities. One joke in particular explored an alleged occasion in which Ansari dined at the same restaurant as 50 Cent one evening and overheard the rapper order a glass of grapefruit juice and ask his waiter why it wasn’t purple. “At this point I realized that 50 Cent has no idea what a grapefruit is!” Ansari shouted with astonishment. “The waiter is explaining it to him! I get to be there for that moment in 50 Cent’s life—when he finds out what a grapefruit is!”

The comedian also mentioned that he’s been reading Mötley Crüe’s autobiography The Dirt while on the road. He brought up Vince Neil’s classic story about how the band members would jam their dicks into burritos to “cover up the smell of pussy” before returning home to their girlfriends after being on tour, noting that it didn’t quite add up. “Couldn’t we just wash the smell off with soap and water? No. Why? I don’t know. Wait, perfect! The smell of carne asada will really throw her off!”

In what seemed like mock-vanity, the comedian set aside a couple of moments to pose for cell phone pictures from onstage, despite everyone being warned not to shoot any pictures or video during the performance. “Here, I’ll just pretend to be in mid-joke, we’ll start on the left.”

Ansari admirably avoided the material from his 2010 stand-up album, Intimate Moments For A Sensual Evening, but he did touch on some familiar subject matter, including his cousins Harris and Darwish and the absurdity of R. Kelly. This time, the target was a new R. Kelly jam called “Echo.” “R. Kelly just keeps doing amazing things,” Ansari explained, in an attempt to justify once again going to the “R. Kelly is crazy” comedy well. He then talked about a recent YouTube video where Kelly explains to his fans what exactly the word echo means. (Incredibly, the video really exists.)

As Ansari pointed out, the definition of a word shouldn’t include the word that is being defined. “A giraffe is like when you go to the zoo and you see a giraffe—that’s a giraffe!” Ansari joked before calling on the audience to give him more words to define. In typical Wisconsin form, someone screamed out “cheese curd.” “Cheese curd? Uh, I don’t really know what to do with that,” Ansari responded, before closing his set by belting out an awesome mock-R. Kelly songs with matching dance moves about banging a girl on an ATM machine; “Withdrawal, deposit, withdrawal, deposit!”