Aziz Ansari is surfing the stand-up zeitgeist right now. After Parks and Recreation wrapped its sixth season he toured with Funny or Die’s Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival alongside Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer. He’s preparing a book about contemporary dating for publication, and his current Modern Romance solo tour leads him from Las Vegas to back-to-back shows at Madison Square Garden, the first of which sold out quickly. The concerts at Manhattan’s prestigious arena represent a milestone and are a sign that his star is on a serious upswing, but Ansari thinks it’s also the latest chapter in a steady career progression.
“I think each tour I’ve done has gotten bigger and bigger,” he said. “And with this tour I was doing so many theater dates where we were just adding so many shows, and we’d end up playing for 12,000-15,000 people in a city. So I thought, ‘Should I try to do an arena?’” He wrestled with himself as he tried to determine whether his comedy would reach arena rafters, “And then I thought about how I really wanted to play the Garden, just to do it. That would be a thing I’ve gotten to do in my career that would be really cool.”
Ansari figured if he was going to perform at the Garden he might as well schedule dates at other arenas as well, and he should make the shows as memorable as a Jay Z or Kanye West concert. He contacted musicians and consultants, and arranged to have visuals for jumbo screens to ensure the arena shows were enough of a spectacle that people were still impressed long after the last joke.
At the same time, Ansari balanced out appearances in front of larger audiences with “pop-up” or secret shows in smaller venues in Chicago and San Francisco, where he refined new material. Ansari enabled fans to bypass ticket brokers by announcing the shows on Twitter and routing people to his website so they could be ultimately contacted by text. It was the latest of several innovations Ansari employed to reach out more directly than through traditional distribution methods, and surely not the last.
The smaller shows allowed him to make the material as “bulletproof” as possible so he could subsequently focus on adapting his act to larger spaces. “Ultimately, jokes that kill in the club are going to kill in the arena, and vice versa,” said Ansari, “You just have to adjust your performance in ways that are hard to articulate, but they’re things that I just sense. When I first started doing theaters it took me a while to learn, ‘Oh, this is how I can use the theater space to improve my performance.’
“There’s a little bit of a learning curve and I assume it’s going to be the same with arenas. I’m just trying to prepare as much as I can, so my material is the least of my concerns.”
Mandalay Bay, 9 p.m. Oct. 4, starting at $35 plus tax and fee. 800.745.3000 Ticketmaster
