Aziz Ansari packs Treasure Island Casino, proves he hates bro culture, as suspected
Like many people, when I first heard that Aziz Ansari, best known as Parks And Recreation cool-guy-who’s-not-actually-that-cool Tom Haverford, would be playing a show at Treasure Island Resort and Casino (just try not singing the jingle right now), I was amused. Maybe it’s some kind of bro joke, I thought. Maybe he’s playing a casino located an hour outside of the city in an attempt to make a bunch of 20somethings have a gambler’s evening, the way his character Tom Haverford would. How very baller, VIP, choice, swag, and other Haverfordian adjectives. The comedian, who’s usually more of a college auditorium attraction, wound up packing the place despite ticket prices set around $50 a seat. The entire ballroom-cum-comedy shop held around 3,000 people for an evening of solid, straight-forward comedy that proved, once and for all, that Aziz Ansari is incredibly skilled at picking on people and getting away with it.
Ansari is very good at one thing both on Parks And Rec and in a stand-up comedy setting: He truly understands the bro, that sometimes enigmatic cultural figure that probably doesn’t deserve to be described with the word “cultural.” Ansari knows this archetype’s emotions, motivations, and petty outrages—and he presents them very well while developing a meta version of his TV show character, a character who’s not aware of how big a joke he is. Ansari gets it, obviously, and he’s smart about how he goes about making his fun, mostly utilizing comparisons (a married couple’s night out in contrast to a guy who’s just scored a threesome with two boobsome chicks) and other, more direct jabs at the dick-headish, backward-hat-wearing club set. He’s adept at pointing out when people are dumb, selfish, macho, and thoughtless, and his stage presence and acting ability do a lot to behoove this effort, as he somehow comes off quite charming, despite a lack of self-deprecation. At one point, Ansari pointed out that in an audience as large as the one in front of him, there were definitely people who he hated, a comment that didn’t return as hefty a laugh as maybe he was hoping.
Ansari’s act is a monument to what he knows: He’s 28 and single, and part of a world where people around him are getting married and having kids, consequently fucking up their lives for the next 18 years of so, a gesture that the very Me Generation crowd couldn’t agree more with. Who the hell gets married these days? In an audience of over thousands, only a few were brave enough to admit to tying the knot.
If there’s any complaint about Ansari’s act, it’s that it’s pretty standard stand-up. He’s not breaking down any walls or passing into any new dimensions, and I suppose that’s okay. Earlier this fall, we watched Maria Bamford at Acme Comedy Club, a comedian who serves as the perfect counterpart to Ansari’s act: manic, depressive, dark, and structurally ambiguous. She gives an artful performance more than she delivers a humorous speech. That’s not to say that Ansari’s act is bad, because it’s not, and it’s not to suggest that he should adopt Maria Bamford-style squealing or moaning, because that would be God awful. But there does come a point in Ansari’s set, maybe it’s at about 45 minutes in, where you kind of get what he’s doing and you’d be more than okay to leave the ballroom and drop a couple of quarters into the nearest slot machine. Ansari isn’t boring, but after 45 minutes or so, the blinking lots of the slots and the exaggerated clinking of the coins call to you. Ansari is fun to watch. But $50? There’s a penny machine out there that you could spend weeks on for that much money.
