Words matter. These are the best Nahnatchka Khan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My family never took vacations growing up. It just wasn’t a thing.
Writing in another person’s voice is a skill you have to develop when you’re working on someone else’s show. But if you can maintain your perspective, that’s what will make you stand out.
I love strong female characters.
Not to say that I saw myself in the Iron Sheik, but our whole family would gather around the TV on Saturday and watch the Iron Sheik wrestle. And he was the bad guy, so everyone else was booing him and cheering whoever he was fighting – it was the opposite in our house.
The more visibility, the more opportunities for Asian-American actors to play great roles. It goes to the studios opening up roles they might not have considered Asian actors for. The talent is there. I don’t think there needs to be one superstar, but having more roles open up, that’s the way changes happen.
I personally feel like the end product is always better when you can make a collective. It’s like a band. You can have a bunch of individual great musicians, but when you come together, there’s a sound that it creates that you couldn’t do on your own.
When you take stock, there are so many more choices and points of view that are necessary.
If you take a step back, you realize that the TV landscape really has been… There have been some amazing shows in terms of representation, but not for Asian people.
You don’t have to be just one thing. I think that applies to women in front of and behind the camera.
Networks love data. They love to be able to look at numbers and try to predict what they think will work.
You can be layered and more than one thing – you can exist outside of the box.
‘Modern Family’ is unique in that it’s telling the story of three different families, which is a huge amount of characters to service.
Find like-minded people who are on the same page as you, and then lift each other up.
‘Seinfeld’ was an amazing show. It’s iconic and defined a whole generation of comedy writers – but by their own admission, that show was about nothing.
Some people don’t have a sense of humor about certain things, and other people do.
For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it’s also what makes you feel like an outsider.
I’m not Chinese, but both of my parents were born in Iran; my brother and I were the first ones born here. First in our family to go to college, that whole thing.
In comedy, it’s so subjective; there is no right or wrong.
When we were growing up, the only person we saw on TV that vaguely resembled us was the Iron Sheik – the pro wrestler whose signature move was the ‘Camel Clutch.’
Stuff starts to feel stale comedically when you’re just rehashing things, so putting together a writers’ room where the majority is made up of people who have not been the focus of the story, it flips everything around.
Norman Lear was talking about everything in the ’70s… race, sexism, all of it. The network comedy really stayed away from that in the 1980s and 1990s.
Comedy always benefits from different points of view and even tension. It can never be satisfied.
Working in network sitcom arenas, whenever you decide to depart from the norm and tell a story that’s not typical, I think you’re always a little bit nervous.
In the writers’ room, the challenge is always to tell interesting stories in unexpected ways, so we try to never limit ourselves in how we accomplish that.
I never had a backup plan. I’ve only been good at one thing. I admire people who are jacks-of-all-trades. That’s not me.
It’s something that’s almost taken for granted in sitcoms about white families. Like, ‘Oh, we’re going on a summer vacation!’ As if that’s something that everybody does.
I was Persian-American, but I hated bringing Persian food to school. I just didn’t want to stand out in that way. I wanted to be like everybody else.
Randall Park and Ali Wong, they are so many things; they’re not just one thing, they’re bigger than just their identity.
I went to USC and got my first break writing for a kids’ show called ‘Pepper Ann.’
Sometimes you can feel the gears shifting in scripts, like really trying to make something work that feels sweaty for whatever reason. I really enjoy reading material that just flows – it’s definitely a skill to make something feel effortless.
