“I thought of writing a humor book that was also a sociology book, so that it actually has some heft.” But for that he’d have to conduct a study-and for that he’d need a sociologist. Rather than rehashing his comedy he “wanted it to be an analysis of what everyone’s going through,” he says. When Penguin approached him about turning his comedy into a book, Ansari was struck with an idea. But research shows that online dating has yielded more than just awkward blunders: Between 20, it was the most common way Americans met their spouses-bigger than work, friends and school combined. “Everyone’s dealing with frustrations in the private world of their little screens,” he says. But when he began to ask his audiences about their own romantic texts gone awry, he realized he wasn’t just mining their dating lives for comedic material-rather, he was interested in the now near-universal experience of looking for love with technological assistance. That couldn’t even have happened some years ago.”Īs his prospects with Tanya fizzled, Ansari began to consider the ways smartphones and online dating services have created new social anxieties around flirtation-and the subject became fodder for much of his standup.
Eventually I took a beat and realized: Oh man, I’m going through this whole rollercoaster of emotions simply because someone hasn’t typed out a message on their phone.
“I got worried,” he says, “and then I got furious because I saw Tanya was posting a picture of a horse on Instagram, so I knew she had checked her phone.
Like many long-suffering singletons before him, he received no reply. “Everyone has a Tanya,” says comedian Aziz Ansari about a seemingly successful date he once had-one he naturally followed up with a text message.
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