Darrell Issa stole my fucking hot dog, part 2: Aasif Mandvi gets involved

[Recursion]

Some of you may remember my run in with Darrell Issa a few months ago in which the hair-deprived douchebag stole my hot dog.

Today, Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show visited my workplace (I work for a food/ag lobby that does a lot on meat standards) because he's producing a segment on hot dogs. He wouldn't tell us the whole story of the segment (obviously all TDS interviews involve a reveal of some kind) but we were basically the "experts" who were there to say that whatever town that's trying to ban hot dogs are a bunch of morons. (Then again, that's probably what they tell the crazies, too.)

I talked to him some, and he's a total class act. Very professional and just very nice to people. Since the topic of his segment was hot dogs, I told him my Darrell Issa story (linked above). He laughed for a long time and said he really wished he could get that in this piece but it just wouldn't work. When we gave the crew a hot dog lunch, though, he did make a point of pulling a hot dog off the grill and handing it to me. I thought that was really nice.

The Daily Show crew are hard workers. Way back in the day I worked in television production; I was a show runner for two PBS series. These guys put us to shame: for every 5 minute pre-produced segment, they get an average of 16 hours of interview footage. Also, to talk up their class, when they were interviewing our PR lady about hot dogs, they started doing hot dog/penis jokes (this is The Daily Show, after all) and she simply mentioned that that made her uncomfortable and they stopped immediately and said humor isn't worth making people upset, and moved on to a different tack. Classy, if you ask me.

Right before he went in for the interview I happened to catch him in the hall and I said "Aasif, break a leg". He stopped and shook my hand and said "Nobody's wished me that in a while and that means a lot; thank you".

Anyways, I just wanted to say that if the price of having a nice conversation with Aasif Mandvi is having Darrell Issa steal my hot dog, it's well worth it.

[UTUSN]

1. K&R #4 n/t

[On the Road]

2. Cool Story, Bro

For real! Aasif Mandvi is my favorite on those episodes. I hope he starts getting better roles in movies than M. Night Shymalan movies and bit parts in Spiderman.

The 16 hours of footage for those interviews is astounding.

[Kali]

3. great story - no, two great connected stories!

missed the earlier one