Aasif Mandvi makes a lot of people laugh as a correspondent on "The Daily Show." He stars in a new web series on the website Funny or Die, and he's taping episodes for a future HBO series, "The Brink." NY1's Budd Mishkin filed the following One on 1 profile of Mandvi in January of 2015.

When we think of Aasif Mandvi, we likely first think of the longtime correspondent on The Daily Show.

Mandvi: "There's two things I knew at a very young age that I loved—acting and peanut butter. And those two things have never changed."
Mishkin: "And peanut butter never lets you down?"
Mandvi: "Peanut butter never does. It's the greatest thing ever. 
Mishkin: "Acting, sometimes you can't get a job, but peanut butter, you can always come home to."

Much of Mandvi's work on stage, however, has been quite serious.

Playing six South Asian characters in his one man show "Sakina's Restaurant" and as a prisoner in the play "Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom."

It's his regular appearances on the Daily Show that have brought him national recognition and movie roles and admiration from the South Asian community.

"There was this idea that I was suddenly representing a sector of society that was being underrepresented in the mainstream media, and speaking about it from a place of...as an immigrant," Mandvi says.

Aasif Mandvi was born in Bombay, now known as Mumbai, and was raised in England before the family moved to Florida when Mandvi was 16.

His memoir, "No Land's Man," understandably has plenty of humor in it, reflected in the book's trailer.

The book's tone, though, is quite serious.

"I had the experience of coming here as a teenager and having a critique of America as I got older; whereas for my father's generation, who came here from his background, he was sort of like, 'America—the streets are paved with gold.'"

No Land's Man explores Mandvi's journey as a brown man in American show business, and the struggle to play meaningful roles.

"This idea of 'patanking,' doing that character, which makes Americans laugh, or sort of a stereotypical Indian or Middle Eastern character and then on the other hand, you end up playing essentially a white guy, which has no ethnic specificity and just is like a white person who happens to be brown," Mandvi explains.

His first images of America while growing up in England in the 70's came from television, primarily Henry Winkler—the Fonz.

The actor who had the most significant impact on Mandvi, though, was the great Egyptian actor Omar Sharif in the movie "Dr. Zhivago."

"As an immigrant kid, you have the culture's idea of masculinity—which is often reserved for white men, and then you have your dad, who’s a shopkeeper and who speaks with an accent and tries to navigate through the English language. And one, you don’t feel you have access to, and the other, you don’t want to really be. Omar Shariff represented this third form of masculinity as a brown man," Mandvi says.

Before Mandvi got the call in 2006 that would change his life, the call to audition for "The Daily Show," he was disconsolate, reeling from the news that an ex-girlfriend had just gotten engaged.

"When you're in that space—especially when you're drunk, 'What more can you do to me? I'm heartbroken. Hang on, the phone is...oh I got a job, I'm fine, thank you,'" he says.

Actually, his initial response to his agent's call about "The Daily Show" wasn't so fine.

Mandvi: "I told 'The Daily Show' to f*** off. Can I say that on NY1?
Mishkin: "Absolutely."

"Letterman and Kimmel had done these things like playing Saddam Hussein's voice or tech support guy. I thought, like, this is going to be me flying around on a carpet pretending to fly with a turban  on my head, yelling 'Death to America,' or something so I said, 'No, I don't want to do it.'"

But "The Daily Show" wanted him to audition to be a correspondent.

"Went down there and just did my best Stephen Colbert impression. Really, that's what I did and Jon bought it. And he offered me the job right there. It was literally that quick. I auditioned and I was on the show that night," Mandvi recalls.

Long before Mandvi appeared on New York stages and was on national television, he moved to New York in 1991 to be with his then-girlfriend.

"She was like, 'This is what we have to do. We got to go to Actors Equity at 6 a.m. and stand in line to audition for "Pippin."' And this what we did every day," he says. "On September 10th, I was going in for taxi drivers and snake charmers, but on September 11th, I was going in for terrorists. Suddenly it was all terrorists, terrorists, terrorists, terrorists."

Struggling to play real characters who weren't stereotypes, Mandvi created his own characters—six of them—in the Obie award winning off Broadway show "Sakina's Restaurant."

"Sakina's Restaurant" was the inspiration for the 2009 film "Today's Special," which Mandvi starred in and co-wrote.

By that time, he was thriving professionally—but personally, there were sacrifices.

"My career has been my...the driving force and the passion and it took so much of my energy...when most people were going off and having families and kids and all that, I was kind of...and look, I didn’t reach any kind of 'success,' really, until I was 40," Mandvi says.

Aasif Mandvi is Indian, British, American, and for more than twenty years now, a New Yorker.

"That feeling of being from many places—everywhere and nowhere kind of thing—suddenly just sort of matched with New York and the multitudes of ethnicities and types of people and food," Mandvi says. "It was immediately like, this is the city that matches my energy."

His search for a home ended long ago, but his exploration of his identity continues on screen, on stage and now on the page.

"That question is something that I’ve explored in my work for a long time: what is it to be a South Asian man in the west. It's really what all my work deals with."