Kumail Nanjiani

Kumail Nanjiani Comedian -Born February 21, 1978 in Karachi, Pakistan

Height 5' 8½" (1.74 m)

Mini Bio (1) Kumail Nanjiani was born on February 21, 1978 in Karachi, Pakistan. He is an actor and producer, known for The Big Sick (2017), Life as We Know It (2010) and Central Intelligence (2016). He has been married to Emily V. Gordon since July 14, 2007.

Spouse (1) Emily V. Gordon (14 July 2007 - present)

Is a huge fan of Hugh Grant. He decided to start a stand-up career after being impressed by Grant's performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

He moved to the U.S. when he was 18, attending and graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa.

Graduated from Grinnell College with a double major in Computer Science and Philosophy.

I stay home. It's the best place to be alone. There is hardly any walk-through traffic.

I love, love, love the street-cart food. Gyros are like a meat-flavored fruit roll-up. A meat roll-up.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

You can get stuck in the trap of reading your YouTube comments all the time. Sometimes I regret it. Not everyone is going to love you. And for some reason, stand-up has this thing where everyone thinks they can do it. So everyone thinks they're an expert.

I never really got into game shows. The easiest one is 'Wheel Of Fortune' because you just have to know words, and for the most part everyone knows words.

If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

I think, you know, a lot of the business of comedy is taking your personal experiences and making them relatable to other people.

You really need to have that discipline. It's not even discipline. I just put down these rules. It's not like a vague, 'Motivate yourself!' and do something. It's specific hours set aside every day for certain things.

I would say I try to make my comedy really personal. I try to tell stories that happened to me, experiences from my life.

I moved to New York first and was really apprehensive about moving to L.A., but I really, really like it.

The worst job I ever had was an office job that I had for six years, and that's nothing against the people who I was surrounded by, because they were wonderful people.

When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context.

Wikipedia is kind of weird. I feel it's lame to put up my own page, but I desperately want someone else to do it.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

When I started working on Michael & Michael Have Issues (2009), it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone.

I'm from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.

Honestly, I would love to be friends with Fox Mulder on The X-Files (1993). That's almost a little too obvious, but that would be my answer. I'd love to hang out with him.