Aziz Ansari Works It Out (Maybe?)

As the crowd gathered outside College Street Music Hall on Tuesday night, two drivers from New York approached and asked what the ​“big deal” was. A brief rundown of the answer: performing that night was Aziz Ansari, well-known comedian and actor from the sitcom Parks and Recreation, and creator of the Netflix comedy Master of None, who got caught up in #MeToo when a date he had ended poorly. According to the date’s account, he repeatedly ignored verbal and physical cues.

“Oh,” one of the drivers said, “#MeToo?”

Ansari was accused of pressuring a 22-year-old woman into sex in a Babe.net story from January of this year. After issuing a statement, Ansari maintained a low profile until May.

“Oh,” the driver said again. ​“Thanks!” Then passengers approached the vehicle, and were ushered into the cars and driven away.

Ansari’s Tuesday appearance at College Street — part of a tour announced Aug. 30 of a literally titled set called ​“Working Out New Material” — came at an interesting time. Ansari’s tour lay squarely in the shadow not just of the larger #MeToo movement, but also comedian Louis C.K.’s much-criticized attempt at a comeback in an unannounced set at New York City’s Comedy Cellar in late August after admitting to sexual misconduct.

In New Haven on Monday, Yale Law students staged a sit-in to protest the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court as well as the alleged complicity of Law School faculty in perpetuating a culture of sexual harassment. There was a protest on the Green the same day. Ansari’s stop in New Haven with his hour’s worth of new material proved so popular, College Street added a second showing — and compelled a Yale student to start organizing a protest as well, scheduled for before Ansari’s early show at 7 p.m.

Via email, protest organizer Casey Odesser explained that the protest sought ​“to counter Aziz Ansari’s attempt to win back favorable public opinion after sexual misconduct/harassment allegations. More broadly, we are protesting the link between power, masculinity and abuse that enables men like Ansari, Kavanaugh, Trump, etc. and also is enabled by the institutions around us.”

In light of this, there hung the question of if and how Ansari would address his own #MeToo moment, when Louis C.K. did not. Perhaps guarding against this, mobile devices were strictly prohibited. All phones and other potential recording devices were placed in pouches that locked shut until showgoers left the theater. And any reproduction of specific material was prohibited.

Attending the second later show, I found no protest, and only a few showgoers who would speak on the record about the controversy. ​“You definitely have to separate a Supreme Court Justice from a comedian,” Matt H. said. ​“I think he [Ansari] is right to have a comeback, I guess, in terms of economy if people pay to see him. But he should be under more scrutiny than the average person.”

The early show, which began well past its 7 p.m. start time, finally let out around 9:30 p.m. As people pressed together for pictures under the marquee sign, Dan, a young man with glasses, spoke about the allegations that surfaced against Ansari in January. ​“Weren’t they on a date?” he said. ​“Things got misread. That what was concluded, right? In essence.” He further stated there were no protests that he saw at the 7 p.m. show.

What about the show itself? ​“I enjoyed it,” Dan said. ​“He didn’t talk about it [the allegations or #MeToo].”

What about the fact that some were upset by Ansari’s performance in New Haven? ​“I have no opinion,” Dan said.

This was repeated in various forms by most of the audience members spoken to. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the audience members who lined up and paid for the late show seemed by and large uninterested in the debate surrounding sexual harassment and potential redemption in the #MeToo movement. Two women on the younger side of 25 stated, when asked: ​“I have no opinion” and ​“I really don’t want to talk about that.” A college-age girl in a Yale sweatshirt: ​“I’m not really into being in newspapers.”

Inside the theater, the crowd cheered wildly when Ansari walked onstage. Clad in a black leather jacket, he performed a tight, engaging show — quickly paced, moving the audience through many hot button topics. Prior to the allegations, Ansari’s stand-up comedy had taken aim at sexism, sexual harassment, and general male creepiness, always from the perspective of the harassed. His current material stayed on this trend.

He got into the ubiquity of news, social media’s reach and how he has stopped using it, our personal need to comment on literally everything, racism, how easy it is to fall for conspiracy theories now, including a particularly funny bit of audience work. He complained that people have been trying to one-up each other with demonstrations of social awareness, a key reason he left social media. Toward the end of the show, Ansari suggested that the majority of people are just decent people terrified of both what he termed ​“hardcore Trump supporters” and the ​“ultra-woke,” hoping ultimately that each group would take the other out.

It seems Ansari largely chose to speak about the #MeToo issue that embroiled him personally by not speaking about it at all. By performing a delicate dance around what is arguably the most high-stakes issue in his life, he painted a portrait in relief — not by what he would say, but what he wouldn’t.

His skill as a comedian and writer was on full display, deftly attuning his jokes to skewer the powerful in favor of the less powerful, but also our natural inclination to signal our own virtue in these culturally fraught times. Perhaps Ansari simply knows his own audience — or rather, he has grown his own audience symbiotically, finding his niche as a ​“woke bae” to the point of owning his behavior in print. But we don’t know what he said to her, or what was said to him, outside of what Babe.net published.

And should we? Maybe this is the limit of woke bae-ness; but maybe also this was, and is, a painful and intensely private moment of trauma, played on the world’s stage for all to see, whether or not it was fair. Maybe this is the point at which we judge redemption acceptable. It seemed that way, looking at the crowd.

In the end, the closest anyone came to touching the issue almost everyone wanted to avoid that night was opening act Will Hadley.

“People glorify being single,” he said. ​“They say you can sleep with anyone you want. But you can actually only sleep with anyone who wants to sleep with you. Totally different number.”