Patrick Skene-Catling

The new rules of dating

Stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari reveals some very unromantic modern mating practices in Modern Romance

issue 20 June 2015

An American stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari, who usually performs in Los Angeles and New York, has found time to conduct an international investigation of the mating habits of the young in the digital age. Like most other stand-up comedians, male and female, Ansari evidently bases his act on nationalistic, ethnic and sexual misanthropy, expressed with facetious cynicism. The first words of his introduction are ‘OH, SHIT!’, which seem to promise streetwise modernity but nothing romantic. Is the book only some kind of wise-guy scam? No, it’s not that simple.

Born 32 years ago in Bennettsville, a small town in South Carolina, Ansari apparently felt restricted by what he calls his ‘brown skin tone’ until he moved up to the less racist north. In the bachelorhood of his twenties and the freedom from inhibition of his career in comedy, he felt well able to explore the amorous adventurism of his contemporaries, and a publisher encouraged him to record his findings in print.

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