COMEDY
BY WILL KENNEDY
VOTE HARI!
Stand-up comedian Hari Kondabolu
appears in Eugene
D
on’t call Hari Kondabolu a political comedian.
“I don’t talk about Democrats and Republi-
cans,” the New Yorker says. “I don’t care so much
about the ‘inside the Beltway’ stuff.”
Nevertheless, he has built a career observing
and lampooning the American social order. Along with W.
Kamau Bell he hosts the feisty podcast Politically Re-Ac-
tive, and this month Kondabolu’s documentary The Prob-
lem with Apu premiers on truTV.
“The angles I see first are about race or gender,” Kond-
abolu says. “These are the things I think about every single
day, so these are the things I gravitate to when I see them.
It’s not like I put on a special pair of glasses to find the
politics in it. To me, it’s not politics. It’s people’s lives.”
In advance of his appearance Thursday, Nov. 16, at the
Hult Center, Kondabolu sat down with Eugene Weekly to talk
The Simpsons, identity politics and life as Chicken Little.
Tell me a little about your upcoming documentary,
The Problem with Apu.
The Problem with Apu is a documentary I made about
the character from The Simpsons — the Indian convenience
store owner — the impact a character like that makes when
it’s the only South Asian-American character on American
television.
I tried to make a documentary as funny as it could be
while talking about some pretty interesting subjects. Of
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November 16, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
course, it’s about The Simpsons, which is one of my favor-
ite shows. It has that kind of respectful criticism.
tesville. We see that in subtle ways in the election of this
president. We see that in institutions that value whiteness.
On the subject of national politics, I have to ask: Are
we gonna be OK?
I feel like I’ve been Chicken Little for a long time, and
the sky fell, so it’s hard to be positive. I think that if we
don’t die in a nuclear war, we do have a chance to rebuild.
I think there’s a lot of young people who are upset and
they’re hungry. They want change. It’s exciting to know
that’s coming up as much as the ugliness.
If anything, what’s going on gives me more evidence
of the stuff I’ve been talking about. It’s become easier to
convince people who maybe didn’t want to hear it before
because it’s become so obvious that the president has said
and done things.
Is the left coalescing under the Trump administration
or is this opportunity being squandered?
The left, broadly, I hope, is not the Democratic Party.
This whole discussion of left and right — words end up
having these meanings they’re not supposed to have.
Like “activist.” I hate being called an activist. It doesn’t
mean what you think it means. When people hear the word
“activist,” they have certain images: hemp necklaces and
drum circles and people who have no sense of what it is to
have a rough 9-to-5 job.
Yet if you tell somebody, do you think you should have
Social Security available to you? Do you think your kid
should have a fair chance to go to college? Fairer housing
conditions? A health care system that actually looks after
people? A lot of people who hate the word “activist” would
say yes.
It’s about how do we create a fair world for as many
people as possible, where people’s races and their cultures
and their immigration status and how much their families
had when they were born doesn’t impact their futures.
Working in search of social justice — which fundamen-
tally is how democracy works. You organize. ■
Post-2016 election, some say the left has become too
sidetracked with identity politics. Do you agree?
When people talk about identity politics, I’m trying to
decode that: like, Black Lives Matter? People asking for
their family members not to be deported? Are you talk-
ing about gay people fighting for their rights? Trans people
saying I have the right use restrooms that reflect my gen-
der?
The ultimate identity politics is white supremacy. That
is something we saw marching in the streets of Charlot-
Hari Kondabolu performs 8 pm Thursday, Nov 16, at the Hult Center,
$20-$22.50, all-ages. To hear more from this interview, check out EW’s
What’s Happening podcast.