In February, Aziz Ansari turned 30, a milestone reflected in his latest and most cohesive comedy special yet, Buried Alive. In the show, which the Parks and Recreation star toured last year and taped for Netflix in April, Ansari dissects the ridiculousness of modern romance, marriage, and parenthood, with anecdotes about his friends (on the subject of seeing video clips of their babies’ first steps: “Look, I walk all the time; I’m not impressed”) and occasional participation from the audience. After asking audience members to clap if they got married after knowing their significant other for less than two years, Aziz says, “We’re all laughing because you’re probably getting divorced. . . Did you lose a bet or something? I’ve had sweaters for two years and been like, ‘What the fuck was I doing with this sweater? It’s so stupid looking. I can’t believe I thought about living with this sweaterfor the rest of my life.’”

Other subjects addressed: Grindr, online dating, courting a love interest via text message, and the horror of people marrying their high-school sweethearts. (On the latter, Ansari imagines their internal dialogue: “I don't think I’m going to run into anyone interesting in my 20s or 30s. I’m just going to lock this shit down now.”)

In celebration of his Netflix special, available now, Ansari phoned VF.com last week and told us his thoughts about marriage proposals, the fourth comedy special he has already written, and his very official-sounding food club.

Julie Miller: You’ve spoken to everyone from Charlie Rose to Grover this week—talk about a whirlwind press tour!

Aziz Ansari: When you go from Charlie Rose to Grover, you’re really hit everything. Opposite ends of the spectrum but super fun. The Charlie Rose thing was weird because the other guests that week were Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan. They were the bread to the Aziz sandwich.

Have any of your friends who inspired some of this material been offended by your cynical take on their life’s milestones?

Well, not all of my friends are married or have kids, but the ones who have gone down that path kind of realize that they inspired that whole train of writing. When I’ve done Buried Alive, people come up to me after who are married and have kids and they still totally relate to what I’m talking about.

At one point in the special, you ask married audience members to share how they proposed to their significant others. When you were on tour, were you surprised by just how lame and underwhelming some of these proposal stories were?

When I started tour, I thought that 50 percent of proposals would be pretty romantic stunts, but it actually ends up being 10 or 15 percent. Most people do something very simple. Every now and then, there would be a stunt one. One of my favorite ones was a guy who said he got a bunch of puppies to line up in the kitchen and they all had different shirts that spelled out, “Will you marry me, Katie?”

And I said, “Whoa! How did you get all of those puppies to line up?” And he was like, “Oh, I couldn’t. It was horrible.”

Then there was another one that involved a puppy. It was Christmas morning and the guy put a necklace with a ring around it on the puppy. And I was like, “Oh my god. So Christmas morning, she comes downstairs and a puppy with a ring on it runs up to her and—” and he said, “Oh, it wasn’t a real puppy. It was a stuffed puppy.” I was like, “Noooo! I want to go back to the reality where you bought her a real puppy. I don’t want to live in the world where you proposed with a stuffed animal.”