In his stand-up and writings, Kumail Nanjiani talks a lot about horror movies, Star Trek, video games, advertisements on the L, and other mundane daily stuff. His smart, witty observations and spot-on delivery have earned him a nomination for best comedian at the 2007 Chicago Comedy Awards, a spot in Chicago Underground Comedy's The Pop Stand, and the opening slot on tour with Zach Galifianakis.

While we have heard Kumail ponder the plural of “uterus” and speak at length about Kelsey Grammer’s Girlfriends, we haven’t heard him speak at all about his religious upbringing in Karachi, Pakistan, where he spent his first 18 years before going to Grinnell, Iowa, for college. After 9/11, when he started doing stand-up, Kumail made a conscious effort to not talk about his roots, to avoid being grouped together with other Middle Eastern comedians who had begun using Muslim stereotypes, war, terrorism, and suicide bombing as material for their routines.

This Saturday at the Lakeshore Theater, however, Kumail will finally share his earlier life experiences in Unpronounceable, a new one-man show directed by Paul Provenza, director of The Aristocrats. “Basically,” Kumail says, “the show is about me growing up Shiite Muslim in Pakistan in a very religious family, coming here, and basically losing my religion and losing God and all that good stuff.” More good stuff after the jump.

Chicagoist: How religious was your family when you were growing up? How strict were your parents?

Kumail Nanjiani: We were a very religious family. We prayed five times a day and everything; we went to Sunday school every week. We were raised with a lot of religion. And then I came here when I was 18.

Chicagoist: You said when you came to the U.S. you lost your religion. How did that happen?

KN: When I first came here, I was still religious and praying and all that. And the first time I ever questioned religion, I was doing research for a paper. I was looking up quotes from the Koran, and I found a quote that said—and this was the exact moment I first questioned anything it said—that, if your wife doesn’t listen to you, you’re allowed to “beat her lightly.” That’s what it said. And I was like, that can’t be right. That must be a bad translation. So I looked up other translations, and they all said the same thing: if your wife doesn’t listen to you, you can “beat her lightly.” And I knew that wasn’t right. I knew there was no way that God’s final word to his people was to give husbands permission to beat their wives, no matter how lightly.

That was the first time I questioned anything in there, and I was like, what the hell? If I can’t trust this sentence, can I trust any sentence? So I had an existential crisis that lasted like a year, where I was reading more of the Koran, and just so much of it was not making any sense at all. And that’s when I sort of lost it. It took about a year, and it was absolutely terrifying. And I realized I was losing God and religion at the same time, because I couldn’t see any reason to believe in God. The only reason I was believing in God was because this book had told me to, but it’s the same book that tells men to beat their wives and that women have half the witness power as men, all this crazy stuff.

Chicagoist: Women have what?

KN: If you’re signing a contract, you either have to have one male witness or two female witnesses. And that’s how it is in the whole thing. Why do women have half the power? It’s ridiculous. It’s like, do they all have ADD? Like, the Koran thinks all women have ADD? They can’t be counted on to recall the whole event, you know? There’s a lot of really archaic stuff in there.

Chicagoist: Have your parents seen you perform live?

KN: No, they haven’t actually. They’ve seen it online, and they try to hide it from me when they’ve watched it. But eventually it’s going to happen. And this show specifically I want them to see at some point, once I feel like it’s sort of ready, you know. But I think a lot of my stand-up—not that it’s offensive or anything, but I don’t know that they would be big fans of it.

Chicagoist: A lot of your humor is witty and observational, and you have sort of a dry delivery. Even though you were raised in Pakistan and your formative years might have been a lot different, your humor is so well received by audiences here. You have a lot of fans.

KN: Part of what helps me is that I knew the language really well. Obviously, I learned a lot more of the intricacies once I got here. But, not growing up here, you sort of hear the background noise. Like, I have a thing in my show about how I’ve never been to a dance party before and what a weird idea a dance party is, that you go and there’s a bunch of people in an area that are just shaking around to music. Like, that’s the entire purpose of the thing—these people get together and they shake around to music. When you think about it, yeah, that is a little weird. I think not growing up here sort of helps me with all that observational stuff, because a lot of things that you just sort of take for granted and take as a given are different for me; it’s new for me.

Chicagoist: Did you watch a lot of American TV and movies growing up?

KN: The thing was, we weren’t allowed to listen to music. The punishment in hell, if you listened to music, was you would have molten lead poured into your ears. Yeah, it’s kind of a bummer. But we were allowed to watch movies. So I grew up watching Hollywood movies like Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Star Trek and Gremlins and Ghostbusters and all that stuff. There was a period of time, a few years, where I was watching one American movie every day. So, now it’s weird—when I come here, I know all these obscure movies that people here don’t know. People are always like, how come you know so much about pop culture? Well, that’s what I did, it was like training.

Chicagoist: Have you encountered misconceptions people might have about you, because you’re from a Muslim family from Pakistan?

KN: After 9/11, I would get onstage… I sort of decided I wasn’t going to talk about being Muslim or talk about being from Pakistan at all. Right after 9/11, it seemed like there were all these comedians from the Middle East who were doing Muslim humor, like, “It’s 7-Eleven, not 9/11!” or “I totally bombed!” or “I killed!” or whatever. All these people were doing the same kind of stuff, and they were getting a lot of press, and there were all these tours and stuff, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t get lumped in with that. I knew that even if I talked about it a little bit, that’s what people would latch on to, so I decided I wasn’t going to talk about that stuff at all. So I would go up, not even mention where I was from, and just do the sort of stuff you’ve seen, where I don’t really talk about it that much. And then when I’d be on stage, sometimes people would yell at me. Like, one guy called me a “Taliban motherfucker.” Which, you know, is ridiculous.

Chicagoist: Where was that?

KN: That was at Joe’s on Weed Street. Have you ever been there? It’s a place of darkness. We used to have a regular show there. It is a horrible place. It’s like a big warehouse of douchebags and backwards baseball hats. Yeah, it’s pretty magical. You should check it out one night if you have a certain amount of self-loathing. Good lord, it is the most horrendous place I’ve ever been to. And I used to go there every other week because we had a show there. Oh, man, I’m, like, getting flashbacks right now.

Chicagoist: Were you funny growing up in Pakistan?

KN: No, not at all. I was actually really, really shy growing up, like debilitatingly shy. I couldn’t go up to a storekeeper and buy something, I was that shy. And I was that shy for a long time.

Chicagoist: What did you want to be when you grew up?

KN: I talk about this in the show a little bit. It didn’t really matter to me what I did when I grew up, because it really was like Islam was everything, so whatever day job you do, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re a good Muslim. So, I never really thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Some of the little kid stuff like, as I watched ER, I wanted to be a doctor and, as I watched NYPD Blue, I wanted to be a cop, but nothing really intense. I wasn’t really into being anything besides a good Muslim, and that’s how we were raised.

And that was a big thing when I lost religion. The next step for me was like, well, what the fuck am I going to do with my life? Before this, my whole life was going to be Islam. Whatever I did didn’t matter, as long as I was a good Muslim. So, part two of the crisis was, after I’d lost religion and I was free, what am I going to do with my life and what am I going to become? And I guess a lot of people have that at the end of college.

Chicagoist: So what did you do then?

KN: Doing comedy, I sort of fell into it. I didn’t see any stand-up comedy growing up. My first stand-up special I watched was Jerry Seinfeld’s "I’m Telling You for the Last Time," which was like from ’98 or something, and I loved it. I watched it all the time, over and over again. And then I saw a friend of mine in college do an open-mike stand-up thing, and it was great. She had a blast, she killed, everyone loved it, and our friends were like, hey, you should try that.

So I gave myself six months, and, if I came up with enough stuff, I was going to do it. So, the next semester I wrote like 20 minutes of things; I got up, and I did it, and it went great. It’s still one of the best sets I’ve ever had, you know, mostly because my friends were in the audience and things like that. So, I had a great time doing it and felt like it was something that I could do. So then I moved to Chicago. I had a job here and everything, but I wanted to come and find a real audience and see how things go. I did an open mike and it went great, and I did another one, and another one, and sort of never stopped. It wasn’t like I decided I was going to become a comedian. I just started doing it and liked it more and more and more and realized that’s kind of what I wanted to do. It wasn’t a discrete decision I made.

Chicagoist: I read something about a Muslim comedian from Chicago, Azhar Usman, who does political comedy as a way to promote a better understanding of Muslims. Do you have similar goals with Unpronounceable, or is this more personal?

KN: It’s more personal. I think that’s just a side effect. A lot of people do political comedy; I was never interested in that. Honestly, I just wanted to be funny. I never had an agenda, I was never trying to shake people’s beliefs or get at the foundations of the majority or anything. I was just trying to be funny. This show is mostly a personal thing, and I think it’s going to be fairly eye-opening for people, because I don’t think people really understand what it can be like growing up in a place like that. It’s just my story, and I’m not trying to bridge it to any sort of modern world politics or anything, but I think it’s inevitable. I think people will get a little better perspective on that, but that’s not my purpose for it. I’m not doing it to try and foster peace, you know? And I think it’s a bit presumptuous when people try to do it for that.

Chicagoist: Why are you doing this show now?

KN: I realized that it’s a big part of me that I have not explored on stage at all. The first 18 years of my life I have not mentioned on stage at all. And it’s obviously a really, really big major part of who I am right now, and it’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for the past couple years, I’ve realized. It’s also sort of a way to explain to my parents. Parents think that you succumb to the temptations of the West, you know, but it’s not that. There was more thought behind it; it’s not just that I gave in.

It’s sort of me doing all the things in this that I said I would not do in my stand-up. I don’t think my stand-up is going to change after this. I’m not going to start doing ethnic stuff. My stand-up is going to stay the same, just random goofy things. I think it’s just this one show that I’m going to do that’s going to get all that stuff out there.

I think also, right now, with all the stuff that’s going on with Iraq and all of that—you know, you think of suicide bombers, and people here seem to think of suicide bombers as either crazy or people get angry at it, and this show is also sort of a way of trying to give people a little bit more of an access into the psyche of someone who would do suicide bombing. And I’m not saying that I could have been a suicide bomber, but, being raised Muslim and where I was from being violent, I can sort of see how someone becomes a suicide bomber. When I hear about a suicide bomber, I get sad more than angry. And it’s really easy here for people to be like, well, that guy is crazy, these people are crazy, they’re blowing themselves up, it makes no sense. Well, it does make sense in the context of things. It does make sense if you know where this person is from and how they were raised and the environment.

Chicagoist: Do you think Muslims will come to see the show?

KN: God, I hope not! They’re gonna hate it! If I stand up on stage and see like a sea of beards and hijabs, I’m going to freak out. In Pakistan, sacrilege—saying anything against the Koran or the Prophet or Islam—is punishable by death. They kill you. That’s in the fucking law book. It’s not just people going vigilante and killing you. It’s in the law book. So, this show is actually something that if I put on in Pakistan could get me killed. Legally, it could get me killed. Legally. And it’s not because this show is hardcore or it’s in your face and I’m like “Fuck you, Islam, I’m coming for you”—that’s not the purpose. The purpose of it is me coming to the realization that it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Really, really religious Muslims are going to be offended by it. I told the guy who’s directing it that I was afraid they’d be coming, and he was like, no, let them come, it’ll be good, it’ll shake their foundations. Again, I don’t want that, because that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m not trying to get people to change the way they think or anything. I’m just telling my story.

You can see Kumail Nanjiani tell his story at the Lakeshore Theater this Saturday, July 7, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 and are available through the Web site. If you can’t make it this time, Kumail brings a second show to the Lakeshore on Friday, August 24, at 8 p.m.