Aziz Ansari, comedian and co-star of ‘Parks and Recreation,’ will come to UCLA tonight for a performance and Q&A

Aziz Ansari’s rise to fame in the comedy world has been nothing short of meteoric.

In the space of a few years, Ansari has gone from uploading funny clips to YouTube in his spare time to hosting the MTV Movie Awards and starring in “Parks and Recreation” alongside Amy Poehler. Last November, it was announced that Ansari would star in a trio of Judd Apatow movies.

Ansari, who was unavailable for an interview because of production commitments, will be performing a new stand-up routine and answering questions tonight in Ackerman Grand Ballroom at 9 p.m. as part of a Campus Events Commission speaker event.

Campus Events Commissioner Joanne Lin said that it has been difficult to arrange the event given Ansari’s increasingly busy schedule.

“He just keeps getting bigger and bigger and getting more and more projects, and it just never worked out until now,” Lin said.

For some students, the anticipation has been building for months. Rippin Sindher, a fourth-year sociology student, has been following Ansari’s career for the past year. She said that she enjoys Ansari’s unusual brand of humor.

“It’s funny because I think he’s relatable to a variety of people,” Sindher said. “He kind of makes nerdy jokes with mainstream humor, and it just meshes really well.”

Ansari’s humor is aggressive, absurd and often profane. One of the most enduring characters he has created is Raaaaaaaandy, an obnoxious stand-up comedian who typically begins his shows by shouting “Are y’all ready to laugh your dicks off?”

In Ansari’s most famous YouTube clip, he, alongside “Human Giant” co-creators Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer, plays a cutthroat children’s talent agent who successfully pitches a show that pairs children and inmates in a reality television show called “Kiditentiary.”

Ansari’s unusually rapid rise to fame has been facilitated by social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Ansari updates his Twitter several times a day and maintains a blog at

azizisbored.tumblr.com. This uniquely personal touch has allowed him to connect with his fan base in an unprecedented way; Ansari uses his online presences to orchestrate humorous stunts and publicize the humorous aspects of his life. He publicly pokes fun at his younger cousins, Darwish and Harris, live-tweets during bad movies and runs a food club that awards his favorite restaurants via Tumblr.

Anita Raman, a fourth-year environmental science student, first heard of Ansari through a YouTube clip in which Ansari joins a Facebook group for his cousin Harris’ class and heckles his classmates.

“He’s very real. … He’s someone you want to hang out with and know what’s in his brain,” Raman said.