Aziz Ansari's Master of None Offers Both Comedy And Insight

Aziz Ansari has done it again.

His latest Netflix comedy Master of None, released last November, chronicles the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of Ansari’s Dev Shah, an aspiring actor living in the hustle and bustle of New York. Writing this three months after its debut, I may be a little late but this 10-episode series surely deserves all the praise and approval that it can get.

The show is somewhat of an autobiography, as Ansari is a co-writer alongside Alan Yang, writer for Parks & Recreation. Although he plays a fictional character, pieces of Ansari are found in Dev. In each episode, Ansari grapples with some basic questions and issues of daily life as well as problems that are definitely relevant to the modern day and age. How different will life be once he has kids of his own? Why is this girl not texting him back? In its first season, Master of None provides commentary on assorted life events of a young adult navigating through the obstacles that society, romance, and his family present him with.

The series’ second episode “Parents,” tackles the complicated relationship between first-generation children and their immigrant parents (Part of its brilliance lies in the fact that Ansari’s actual parents played themselves in the episode, shown on the right).

Dev and his friend Brian repeatedly complain about their fathers’ incessant but simple requests, like updating an iPad or going out to buy rice. We then go back in time as flashbacks expose the fathers’ respective childhoods in India and Taiwan and the challenges they faced as they sought a better future in America. These sequences provide the audience with a new perspective, juxtaposing the luxurious reality of first-generation children with the parents’ harsh difficulties previous to immigration.

In an attempt to learn more about their lives, Dev and Brian take their parents out to dinner. When asked about her first day in America, Dev’s mother replies, “I sat on the couch and cried.” The show is blatantly and brutally honest in its portrayal of immigrants’ difficult journey to success. She wouldn’t even answer phone calls out of fear that no one would be able to understand her accent, something that Brian’s father also attested to. In another set of flashbacks, Dev’s father was disrespected at his new job while Brian’s parents were refused a table at a restaurant merely for being Asian. Both sets of parents shared experiences of various forms of discrimination upon their arrival in America, revealing that such encounters were typical elements to all immigrant stories regardless of country or race.

As the episode shows, children often forget or are unaware of the sacrifices that their parents made for them. They know that their parents’ pasts were “hard” but may be oblivious to the actual hardships that they had to endure. “Parents” demonstrates that a little thoughtfulness, whether it’s a weekly phone call or a couple minutes of technological help, goes a long way and even helps to strengthen the bond between parent and child.

However, the episode doesn’t end without some hilarity — a surprising turn of events occurs in its final moments. After hearing his father’s story about never having a guitar as a kid, Dev buys him one, along with a month’s worth of guitar lessons. Yet after one lesson, he finds out that his dad cancelled them all and says, “Leave me alone. Let me play my computer games, man.” The once neglected, unappreciated parent has now taken on the characteristics of a gadget-obsessed teen. “Parents” undoubtedly shows the perfect mixture of heart and humor, a combination that continues on in every episode of Master of None that follows.