A decade ago, Kumail Nanjiani was just another comedian performing on shows around L.A., touring a little, appearing on podcasts, and working toward his first hour special, which would become 2013’s Beta Male. He was a great stand-up and did well with all sorts of audiences. But then, as it so often does, success started getting in the way. Silicon Valley set the stage, but the Oscar-nominated movie The Big Sick was a moment. Nanjiani and his co-writer–wife, Emily V. Gordon, have been developing, producing, and writing projects since, but it was acting that has taken Nanjiani farthest away from the stage, whether it was high-profile projects like The Eternals and Obi-Wan Kenobi or dramatic turns like his upcoming role in Hulu’s Chippendales, which premieres November 22.
At Vulture Festival, during a live episode of Good One, Nanjiani discussed his time in stand-up and his years away from it. Read some excerpts from the interview, below, or listen to the full episode of Good One wherever you get your podcasts.
We are going to play a clip of some of Kumail’s material. It’s from his 2013 stand-up special, Beta Male. And then afterward, we’re going to talk about that and things related to that. That’s what’ll happen.
Hi, everybody! I was sweating in the back watching that! Geez!
When’s the last time you watched that?
Thirty seconds ago.
Before that?
Oh my God, years and years! Years and years.
What’d you think?
[Laughs.] I think that guy’s going places! I like those jokes. That was nine years ago. I haven’t done a special since then. I think with my delivery, sometimes I’m pushing in a way. I can tell I’m not fully comfortable onstage. So that’s all I can hear: nerves and discomfort onstage.
How did you write jokes? What was your process? How did it evolve?
The types of jokes I wrote really changed, and that was the beginning of the new way that my jokes were. For a long time, I was in Chicago and I was just waiting for, I don’t know, God to speak to me, which is how everybody was then: “You can’t force it, you have to wait for the heavens to open up,” which is such b.s. At one point I decided that I would write for at least ten minutes every day, and that changed my life, because sometimes it would just be ten minutes, but most of the time it would go longer. I had to write for at least ten minutes without stopping or deleting anything or judging. So that really took the pressure off, because sometimes I would feel like any time I would write, it had to be really good. When I took the pressure off having to be “good” when I was writing, it genuinely changed my life in so many ways. In the beginning, it was all one-liners. In a minute, I could tell four or five jokes.
Would you be word-perfect for everything? Was everything written down?
Everything was written down. I would always write down everything, and I would have the big Word doc, and where the laugh lines were, I’d have it in bold. I had a few years where I was honestly feeling very confident in my stand-up, and that’s what I miss most.
That feeling of being confident?
In my stand-up. I don’t have that level of confidence in anything in my life now. It doesn’t feel egotistical to say it now, because I don’t have it now, but there were a few years ago where I felt like I could go up in front of any crowd, in any city, on any stage, and do really well, and I had that full belief.
So the first step with writing often is just sort of observing that there might be a joke to write in that area. What did that feel like for you, especially when you’re watching a movie, what is happening in your brain to go, “Oh, there’s something here that I remember?”
When I was first doing stand-up in Chicago, like I said, all my jokes were one-liners, and that really is how I am offstage. Before that, I wasn’t like that. I had sort of a persona onstage because I was so nervous, so my thing onstage was to be very nervous. Pete Holmes still makes fun of me for it all the time. He does an impression of “Old Kumail.” They’re not flattering. His “New Kumail” sucks too. [Laughs.] But because I was nervous, there were only certain kinds of jokes I could do. I couldn’t really do anything that was personal. I don’t mean “personal” in the sense of opening my heart and soul. Even like, “I watched a movie” or something that happened to me, I could not do.
I remember the night I was doing stand-up onstage at a place called the Lincoln Lodge, which is where I met Emily, the woman I married. Weird way to say “wife.” I was onstage and I’d just seen an episode of Star Trek that I really liked, and I was like, Shit, I think I have something funny to say about that Star Trek episode, but I can’t do it with the persona I have. So that was the moment I was like, Okay, I have to change myself onstage so that I can talk about whatever I want to talk about, and that ended up being something that’s close to how I am offstage.
Around the time you were working on this special in 2012, you appeared on a live episode of You Made It Weird with Judd Apatow at SXSW. This led to you having a meeting with Judd. You tell him the Emily story, and he tells you to write that movie. That’s a story that you said you didn’t think you’d be able to work into your stand-up. Again, there’s longer stories in here, but also you worked on a one-person show and felt like you didn’t want to keep working on it. This is all to say, were you feeling that there was a limit to what you personally could express through stand-up around that time?
Definitely. I was starting to feel onstage that if it doesn’t get a laugh, it’s not successful, and that’s limiting about the things you can talk about or do. I don’t remember what it was, but there were a bunch of jokes that I was trying to do onstage that were sort of vulnerable and personal but weren’t working because they just weren’t meant to be stand-up jokes — or I hadn’t found out how to make them stand-up jokes. So I was feeling a little bit constrained by stand-up. There are great comedians who are able to do everything onstage. I never got to the point where I felt absolutely, completely creatively fulfilled doing stand-up.
So I want to play a clip from that movie, 2017’s The Big Sick.
Still kills! So I believe both Michael Showalter, the director, and Emily wanted to cut it. Tell me about coming up with it, and why you fought to keep it in.
One thing about that is after the joke, I’m sort of mumbling for a little while, because the next beat is a very serious dramatic beat. We had to add ten seconds of me kind of mumbling, because people were laughing so much that they were laughing into the serious scene and missing a really important piece of information.
The joke came from me, Emily, and Judd. I don’t remember who else was there. This was before the movie was greenlit. I mean, it didn’t get greenlit until right before we started shooting. But Judd kept saying, “It has to be constant conflict and super-fucking weird the entire time. Like, these people should not be together in this situation, and yet they are.” For instance, he was like, “Maybe her dad can ask you how you feel about 9/11.” And I remember I just said to Judd, “It was a tragedy. We lost 19 of our best guys.” And I laughed, and nobody else laughed. I was like, “Guys!” That’s the best thing about riffing onstage sometimes: You say something and you’re like, I could not have sat down to write that. That had to come from whatever this thing was, you know? So I wrote it down and I put it in the script, and Emily and Mike were both like “That can’t be in the movie.” And I was like, “Let’s just film it, okay?”
Filming that scene actually ended up being kind of a rough day of filming, just because when you do a comedy scene that’s just two people talking, after the two takes it doesn’t really feel funny anymore. You do a bunch of takes, and it’s just me weirdly defending 9/11 15 times! So then when we cut it, they took that joke out, and I was like, “Guys, we have to have that joke in!” I think we tested it without that joke, and I was like, “Let’s just test it.” I was the only one who was pushing for it. It did so well at the first screening that there was no discussion about that after. And I was just pushing for it because I thought it was very funny and surprising! I just thought it was a great joke.
In thinking about it, did your character have to be a comedian for the movie to make sense? Part of it is it depicts how a comedian would interact in this situation. You were a comedian when this situation happened. For you not to be a comedian, it would be weird that this is how he interacts with people.
Yes, that’s right. Exactly. He’s always making jokes, you know? And Judd obviously loves stand-up comedy, and from the beginning, he was like, “You should be a comedian because you can just do that.” Then you can have a character who’s saying the worst possible thing at every moment, and it’s fine, because that’s kind of what comedians do.
It felt like this movie coming out changed something, in that you took this very personal story that was about your experience, and when it was received, it became about a lot of people’s experiences. Can you talk about what it was like to go from doing a thing just because you want to express yourself personally to realizing it would be meaningful to other people, and how it changed how you thought about your career?
I honestly had just really needed to make this movie. I had to convince Emily to do it — she didn’t want to do it at first. So the first draft — which I have to stress, was not the movie, and absolutely terrible — was just me. And then when Emily came on, suddenly it was way better.
We were sitting at Sundance, and it was the first time people were really going to see it, and it’s at the big theater, so it’s like 1,000 people in a theater. To that point, nobody had seen it other than a tiny test audience. So I was sitting there, and Emily turned to me and was like, “Just so you know, this is the last time this is going to be our story.” Suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. For me, the goal was just to make the movie. Having people watch it was not something that was part of my math at all. As the lights were going down, it really kind of hit me. People really connecting to it and seeing themselves in it was surprising, and I didn’t quite know how to handle it, and I still really don’t know how to handle it.
I don’t know how it has affected how I do my work going forward. I don’t think you can anticipate any kind of reaction from people. I think all you can do is make something that you can be proud of. That’s really as far as you can think. I think that’s part of the problem with Hollywood: People try and guess what people want, and there’s no way to know that. That’s why I think once you have a movie that’s a hit that has dragons, suddenly there’s a ton of movies with dragons — because people are like, “People want dragons!” No, they just like that movie. So although we did not leave a wake of coma movies after us, it was like, Oh, that’s what people want!
Could anyone pitch The Bigger Sick?
Yes. We actually have been contacted about a sequel, and I was like, “What’s it gonna be? This podcast?” It’s very uninteresting. Our lives became boring after that.
I want to ask you a stupid question, which is: Is acting fun? It seems like you really like acting. Listening to you on podcasts over the last ten years, you’re like, “I love stand-up, I’m obsessed with doing stand-up,” and then I just see you fall in love with acting. Is acting really fun?
It’s so fun! It’s the fucking best! It’s so, so fun. I love it so much. It’s the same feeling as when you’re onstage and you’re really in the zone sometimes — I remember having this feeling of knowing what the laugh is going to be before you say the line. You’re sort of in the present and the future at the same time. With acting, it’s the same kind of thing, where you’re talking to somebody and you’re kind of surprising yourself. That’s what’s really fun about it.
I do a lot of prep for acting. I work on the scene a lot. And when they yell “Action!” I forget all that and just try to be in the moment and see what happens. Sometimes you go to weird places. At my best when I was doing stand-up, it was the same: I’ve written the jokes but I’ve forgotten them, and now I’m onstage just seeing how it comes out, what happens. It’s the same with acting. Sometimes they yell “Cut!” and you’re like, Wow, that was exciting! and it’s been a scene where you’re very quiet. And I learned that excitement from working with Holly Hunter on The Big Sick, where I was like, Oh, acting can be that. That is really exciting.
I imagine stand-up, especially the writing, can be a very intellectualized exercise, and acting, when you’re doing it right, is you are in your body and you’re doing it.
Yeah. I think the prep for acting is very intellectual. Figuring out how to play the character is months of intellectual work, and then it’s completely not intellectual at all. You’re really just reacting and in the moment and seeing the other person. I know this all sounds insufferable, but it really, really is true: Your brain is completely off. And for someone like me who’s always had a problem with overthinking, sometimes with stand-up that was also something that would come in, where I’d start overthinking why a joke wouldn’t do well. All of these things are happening, and they pull you out of the moment because you’re looking at what you just did. With acting, the goal is to not think at all, to just be in the moment. It almost feels to me like meditating or something.
We’re speaking on November 12. Do you think of yourself as a comedian? If I were to say “comedian-actor Kumail Nanjiani,” would part of you think “actor-comedian Kumail Nanjiani” or “actor-writer Kumail”?
There was a moment earlier when you said, “You were a comedian,” and that hurt my feelings. I was like, This motherfucker over here. I definitely consider myself still a comedian, and I love doing it. I just haven’t done it at all since February 2020. That was the year I just finished shooting Eternals, and I was like, This will be the year I do stand-up! And then, you know … it didn’t happen.
The hardest thing about coming back from little breaks is, for some reason, the jokes that you were doing before stop working, so you need new jokes. But it’s very hard to get into the gear of writing new jokes if you’re not used to being onstage, so that’s always the tricky thing. For me, the big barrier to coming back is having the time to do jokes and test them out and do jokes and test them out. It’s a commitment. Like, getting ten great new minutes would take me a while.
Remember when you hosted SNL?
Yeah, I do remember when I hosted SNL. I was so nervous for it, but it’s really not a nerve-racking experience. It’s really, more than anything, an exhausting experience. That week is so busy. You’re going, going, going, going, going. And then I went up and I did the dress rehearsal, and it went great, and I was like, Yes! And then I was like, Oh shit, no! That was the rehearsal! I have to do all that again!
When I was asked, I was like, Oh, I want to write a good stand-up set. I hadn’t been doing stand-up a lot and I just kind of wrote this new seven-minute set. That was the last time I was really, like, trying to build a stand-up thing. Beforehand, they told me, “Just so you know, sometimes Steven Spielberg comes and watches.” So I was doing my set and I looked over and he was like, that far, like, row seven. I’m talking and suddenly I was like, Oh, that’s definitely Steven Spielberg. If you watch it, you can see the moment I spot him, and I stumble for a little bit. If you watch it, you’ll know exactly what moment it is. I take a deep breath and I look away, and then I go back to it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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