First, a moment of silence. The beloved cat of the actor-comedian Kumail Nanjiani died three months ago. Her name was Bagel. She was seventeen.
“That’s the saddest I’ve ever been in my whole life,” Nanjiani said one recent evening, his eyes dewy. He was sitting in a large wooden cubby at a Lower East Side cat café called Meow Parlour. Felines roamed the room. Keeping Nanjiani company was a tortoiseshell kitty named Honeybee. A golden stripe sloped down her nose. “Oh, my God, look how pretty that is,” he marvelled.
Nanjiani, who had on a navy-blue shirt and jeans, was in town to talk about his new standup special, “Night Thoughts,” on Hulu. His first in twelve years, it veers through musings on anxiety, concerts, drugs, and Bagel. “I hadn’t missed standup, but I missed being good at it,” he said. “That was the feeling I didn’t like. And I thought, Let me see if this is still something I enjoy.” It was.
He kept busy in the interim. Since releasing the special “Beta Male,” in 2013, he has played a coder on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” a Christmas-obsessed influencer on “Only Murders in the Building,” and himself in “The Big Sick.” He even had a run as Abraham Lincoln in Cole Escola’s play “Oh, Mary!” Nanjiani, who is forty-seven, described that as “a joyful and exhausting experience.” The drag queen Jinkx Monsoon, who co-starred as the cabaret-loving Mary Todd, said, “Kumail has the energy of the smartest child you know, and the sense of humor of the dumbest adult you know.” She added, “His masculinity doesn’t need to be proved.”
Nanjiani spent a chunk of time in the late twenty-tens bulking up for the role of Kingo—a million-year-old superhero-slash-Bollywood actor—in the 2021 Marvel film “Eternals,” directed by Chloé Zhao. His physical revamp gripped the world. “Another beloved schlub disappeared,” a Times reporter lamented.
“People thought I had changed,” Nanjiani said, exasperated. “But I’m the exact same person.” (Scripture for any nerd who gets hot.) The beta had become an alpha.
“Beta Male” covered animals, too. (“Most birthdays in Pakistan, a monkey shows up,” Nanjiani says, in a hoodie. Beat. “The fact that you just accepted that is racist.”) But the jokes largely stayed on the surface. “That special was the greatest hits of the first twelve years of me doing comedy,” he said. With “Night Thoughts,” he digs deeper. After years of therapy, he explained, “I was, like, ‘O.K., what are all the things that are hard for me to talk about?’ One of them was my cat being sick.” Bagel takes up about ten minutes of the hour-long special. “That material was genuinely difficult for me to do every time,” he said. It has inspired his latest goal: doing a dramatic play. “I want to have real emotions in front of a crowd,” he said. (“I could see him as Henry the Fifth,” Monsoon said.) A tuxedo cat padded over—named Downy, after the fabric softener.
Nanjiani and his wife, the writer Emily V. Gordon, have recently adopted a kitten named Biscuit. It’s been an adjustment. “Bagel was always a dignified cat, and this cat has no dignity,” he said. “It’s a bit of a dumbass.” Honeybee, bored or offended, walked away.
On his way out, Nanjiani noted a tiny white kitten; an attendant said that she was up for adoption and that her name was Bridget. “I wish I lived here,” Nanjiani said. All for the best, though: “I don’t like human names for animals. I find it unsettling.” He pointed to a mature brindle. “Who’s this big guy?”
“That’s Joy,” the attendant responded.
“I just got a five-month-old tabby,” Nanjiani said, whipping out his phone. “Can I show you a picture?” ♦
