Photo by Yoon Kim
Hari Kondabolu is the guy you hope shows up at your cocktail party: funny, fiercely informed, and unabashedly opinionated. When he was a teenager, he watched comedian Margaret Cho's special on Comedy Central. It was a formative experience. Seeing an Asian-American talk candidly about her immigrant family gave him the gumption to pursue a career in comedy. His standup similarly draws from his experience as a first-generation American. (He says his mom is the reason he's funny—and his dad is the reason he's anxious.) In his shows, he reflects on everything from the wounded snowflakes of Tumblr to why Apu from The Simpsons makes him want to kick the crap out of Hank Azaria, who voices the Indian proprietor of the Kwik-E-Mart on the long-running animated series.
Kondabolu has been featured on Fresh Air, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Moth, and 2 Dope Queens, among other appearances. On December 15–17, Kondabolu will perform five shows at Helium Comedy Club in support of his most recent album, Mainstream American Comedian.” SLM caught up with him earlier this week, while he was in Kansas City.
How are you enjoying the Midwest? It’s been nice so far. I had some barbecue. There’s not much to report. It’s cold. I had some good food. No risk of a tornado at this point.
How’s it been doing comedy as a liberal since the election? There has been some heaviness. People come to me for levity in general, but especially now because of the election. I made the effort to talk about it, to include it. I could even see it during the first couple of shows I did after the election. I talked about Trump right off the bat, and it broke a tension... It wasn’t acknowledging the elephant in the room—we’d all been trampled by the elephant. It’s painful. I have to figure out what stage of grief the audience is in and respond to that.
I talk about issues which are fairly evergreen: racism, sexism, colonial conquest... So when Trump says what he says or changes history or deletes history or shapes the conversation in ways that are un-American—like being racist, sexist, or xenophobic—he in a really strange way gives me a news peg to talk off. I can always talk about immigration, but now I can say "The president-elect says this." I always talk about sexism; now I can say, "This is what the president-elect says on tape." He is saying things in such a blunt way, without dog-whistling, that it’s a shared language. It’s a focal point.
As a comedian, is there anything about Trump's persona that seems like a gift? If we’re talking about his hair and how he talks, there’s a superficial element that’s always been there—his choices, the absurdity of the things he says. It might mask all the nefarious strings that are happening underneath. [But] if you left the Bush years and what you took away was the ridiculous things that Bush said, you missed the Bush years. To me, it’s frosting. Maybe the gift—comedically and not in any other way—is that things become more pressing. Whatever jokes he’s given me, he’s given me a giant lump of coal.
How do you move forward? Whenever there’s repression, the best art comes out of that. I feel a little added pressure and responsibility. Comedy brings us together. When you’re in a space of happiness, you hope that people will listen and give you a chance. There’s always common ground: I’m a human being who lives in this country, who experiences the same frustrations, who doesn’t understand a lot of the way this country runs. The corporatization, trash television—there are commonalities that we share.
The ugliness that came out the way it did, that the ugliness was strong enough to put someone in office who is not qualified, who speaks in over-the-top ways, who is clearly lying. It was interesting to hear Trump voters say, "Well, he doesn’t mean what he says…” If you know the person is blatantly lying and saying things that are hurtful and saying things that hurt your values, then why?
