Kumail Nanjiani, who plays Gitmo Guy on The Colbert Report, gives you advice on the latest new drug cocktail (at 4:40). He’s on Comedy Central tonight at 11pm ET / 8pm PT as the warmup act for ‘Live at Gotham.’

He began performing at open-mike nights eight years ago at the Cubby Bear in Chicago, where he had moved after college, took a writing class at Second City and wrote what became his breakthrough work, an autobiographical one-man show called “Unpronounceable”… in which Mr. Nanjiani described how coming to America both strengthened his relationship with his family and deepened his ambivalence about his Muslim upbringing… “It was very controversial with Muslims…”

From there he did a stint as the opening act on Mr. Galifianakis’s national tour last year… That led to his selling NBC on an idea for a sitcom that he would write and star in. “It’s basically about my marriage and my family — a Pakistani living in Brooklyn with his Southern wife…” (NBC has paired Mr. Nanjiani with John Pollack, a writer of “Community,” to develop the script.) Though he finally has a significant paycheck — a deal like what he has with NBC probably pays in the neighborhood of $100,000 to write a pilot episode — he still does not have a future he can count on; a fully booked week of stand-up might bring in $700 or $800. [NYT]

It’s a hell of a sea change when a guy with an accent can hit it big in the comedy biz, not making his ethnicity the focus of his act, except on Colbert. A guy named Barack is president, and Nanjiani isn’t doing Yakov Smirnoff.