Race + Comedy: Hari Kondabolu Balances His Conscience With His Craft
“It was hard,” he says. “I had to get used to the idea that ‘this’ is not for everybody. If you’re making the art you truly believe in and that is your voice and that defines you, you might not be able to be friends with everybody. You do the best you can, but if they’re not down with you, then on a certain level there’s going to be a disconnect. If you see me do a show, if you want the real me, you have to either take it or leave it.”
In this way Kondabolu’s personal-political choice begets comedic choice begets artistic choice and so on as he finds himself having to regularly consider just what he needs to do in order to have one of his jokes “work” (i.e. make people laugh). This is a common enough process for the average comedian, except in Kondabolu’s case this sometimes means having to highlight one oppression at the expense of another, like a matrix-of-domination spin-the-wheel game.
“One time I was asked about the word ‘dumb.’ I used the word ‘dumb’ in a joke–folks who are mute were called ‘dumb’ historically as a slur–and I made the choice to keep a joke that used the word because I felt like that’s what makes this point work,” he says. “I hate to make those choices because it pits one oppression over another but [as a comedian] you have to make choices and I decided, ‘this is a joke about immigration,’ so I went for it. If I took that word out it loses the power to push this immigrants’ rights piece so I had to make a choice. I do the best I can to be deliberate with language and you know, I fail, but I try to acknowledge it.”
Another joke, he says, landed him in a disquieting conversation with a transgender man: Kondabolu set up the joke by saying that the U.S hasn’t had a woman president because the sexism of (cisgender) men makes them believe that by having a period once a month, all women are “irrational.” The punchline: as a guy with a penis and testicles, Kondabolu says his judgment “is impaired every five to seven minutes.” After the show, he says, the guy told him it hurt to hear Kondabolu assert that a woman was defined by her biological setting without an additional caveat that explained how gender is a construct.
“I agree with this person, they’re right,” Kondabolu says. “[But] even if I took it into consideration I made a choice that the point I was making wouldn’t work if I did that, because I’ve tried it where I’ve tried to add more language to be inclusive and it doesn’t work [for a mainstream audience]; it’s important that you get the right language but at the same time it makes it hard to talk, right?”
While Kondabolu navigates writing comedy that both the mainstream audience and the social-justice advocate can enjoy, Anne Libera, Director of Comedy Studies at the internationally renowned improv group The Second City in Chicago and author of The Second City Almanac of Improvisation, says comedians can not be expected to dismantle systemic privilege; the court jester still lives in the king’s castle, after all.
“Comedians in and of themselves are not activists,” she says. “The job of a comedian is to make people laugh. It would be more accurate to describe comedians who do political satire or political comedy as ‘backwards activists’ – individuals who shed light on things that need to change. The job of a comedian is, essentially, to put light to truth, to try and get people to laugh by saying what is risky or meaningful. To a certain extent comedy is designed to promote a response but not change the situation. It’s pushing people to the edge of their comfort zone but not necessarily into action.”
While Kondabolu is aware that his social justice-oriented audience wants “bigger” choices from him as a comedian who “gets it,” he says he is still every bit the mainstream comic invested in having healthcare.
Courtesy: The Stranger
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