Aziz Ansari’s Companionate Comedy
Sensing that he’d tapped into a largely undocumented experience, he partnered with Klinenberg to collect and distill data from research they conducted in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Wichita, and Doha, Qatar, to explore his hypothesis that “in a very short period of time, the whole culture of finding love and a mate has radically changed.”
.. Ansari is clearly fascinated with gadgetry, and perhaps for that reason he overlooks the fact that most modern love begins not merely via devices and screens but with writing. Which is an opportunity missed: exploring the tension between text-based courtship and our predominantly visual culture might have yielded some compelling insights.
.. Part of what Ansari provides, in both his book and his comedy, is a voice for tech-based alienation; it’s a key factor to the scope of his success. Simply by talking about what it’s like to ask someone out by text message, he addresses the vulnerability and the melancholy many of us feel, alone, when our words zip off into the electronic ether.