Kumail Nanjiani

It's what I represent to them in this moment.

I know the fault is theirs.

However, you feel very reduced.

You feel very flattened to one aspect of you, which is the fact that I'm brown.

And even though you understand it's their fault, it does make you feel smaller.

That wasn't something I ever internalized.

So getting heckled in that way wasn't, I say, damaging in the way that, like the Emily reading a line I wrote and going, I don't like this, has the potential to be way more damaging than someone saying, hey, where's Osama?

It's not going to get deep.

It's something...

that I am in mortal danger, so that's something.

But it's not something I'm gonna carry with me all week.

It's just something, for me, the heckling thing was, oh, I need to figure out how to deal with it.

That's actually when I started learning to be more present on stage.

and having to riff was from that stuff, was from getting heckled and being like, if I wanna do this, I have to figure out how to react to something that's just happened in the room.

Not just heckling, other stuff too, other kinds of heckles, not just racist heckles.

And that led to me realizing, you know, all this stuff we're talking about.

So it does come, in a way,

grateful for post 9-11 onstage racist tackling because it led me to where I am now, which is the value of understanding of being in the present.

Racist heckling.

Are you being hard on yourself for it?