Race + Comedy: Hari Kondabolu Balances His Conscience With His Craft
By Guest Contributor Caitlin M. Boston
Hari Kondabolu on stage. Courtesy: harikondabolu.com
I’m willing to wager that you don’t laugh at every joke you hear–to each her own fart joke, as it were. An obvious fact, but therein lies the challenge for stand-up comedians: how do you make as many people laugh as possible, while still being true to yourself and what you value?
Take that comedic quandary, bear-trap it to an ongoing graduate-level sociology course, and you are now in the head-space of confounded sui generis comedian, Hari Kondabolu.
A first-generation Indian American with roots in Queens, NY, Kondabolu’s comedy is nothing if not a direct reflection of what he values, a baroque product wrought from a first-generation American perspective, academic privilege, work as an immigrant-rights organizer, and of course, White people. Over the past several years as an internationally featured headliner he’s shared his truth in jokes about encountering the “ethnic section” in the grocery store, being colonized by an English girlfriend, ,and how Superman is an undocumented “alien,” yet no one seems concerned. His stand-up makes you feel like you’re ingesting a chuckle-coated vitamin of current socio-political affairs–something theoretically good for you, if at times difficult to swallow.
When you consider that the general population doesn’t know what white privilege is, let alone patriarchy or trans-positivity, choosing to base comedic material on topics that are more often associated with tears than laughter is a challenging and bold choice for a mainstream comedian.
“I’m not exactly a great late Friday or Saturday night performer,” says Kondabolu, who just worked his way onto the writing team for Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. “I may be better on a Thursday when you’re not completely drunk. I can imagine some of my stuff…even if you’re sober you need to think a little bit and when you’re not in the mood to think, I get it, you know?”
Kondabolu made the conscious choice not to pander to the status quo early on in his career. Prompted in part by the social and political melee against Brown people following 9/11, his comedic paradigm shift came from a realization that his material no longer matched his burgeoning conscientization and he didn’t like the type of laughs he was getting as a result.
“What I thought about the world and what I was writing comedically, it [wasn't] matching. It freaked me out, and I knew I had to stop,” he says. “My writing up until that point either essentialized myself for laughs or said things that were racist, or sexist, or homophobic. Early on, I didn’t see stand-up as anything more than making people laugh, you know, ‘Are they laughing; are they not? How do I make them laugh?’ I didn’t really have any real sense of ‘how am I affecting an audience other than laughter? What is it that I’m doing?’ Which to be fair, every young comic has to figure that out for themselves to a certain extent.” Kondabolu’s mockumentary, Manoj, unpacks this unfortunate comedic trend of hack-stereotype jokes by exploring the cyclically exploitative relationship between an audience and a Brown comedian who performs, in essence, a Brown minstrel show.
Kondabolu now actively contends with the responsibility that comes from assuming the mantle of comedic expositor though: as he puts it, “Racism is an occupational hazard of comedy.”
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