Aziz Ansari

Aziz Ansari came up through the sketch group Human Giant, which he co-created and which the catalogue dates to 2007, and then into the role that made him famous: Tom Haverford on Parks and Recreation from 2009 to 2015. Tom is a salesman with nothing to sell, and the comedy sits in the distance between his confidence and his product. Ansari plays him fast, fast enough that a lot of people assumed speed was the whole act.

Master of None, which he created and starred in from 2015 to 2021, was the correction. It gave him a quieter register and room to sit inside scenes rather than skate over them, and it won him two Emmys for comedy writing plus a Golden Globe that the Wikipedia summary describes as the first award received by an Asian American actor for acting on television.

He also writes prose. Modern Romance, published in 2015, sits in this catalogue as a book beside his screen work, which is not something most sitcom regulars can claim. In 2025 he directed the feature Good Fortune and played Arj in it, along with a chorus of delivery robots.

The film career before that was mostly friend-of-the-lead work in the Apatow and Rogen orbit: Randy in Funny People, Eugene in I Love You, Man, Matty Briggs in Get Him to the Greek, Chet in 30 Minutes or Less, a version of himself in This Is the End. The animation has been steady alongside it, with Squint in Ice Age: Continental Drift, Mub in Epic and Darryl on Bob's Burgers. He remains the rare comic who got more interesting after the sitcom, not less.