Is the Joke in “Explaining The Joke”? And Hari Kondabolu
It’s hard having an accent in this country and you are judged based on it.
I can imagine that it must be hard for my folks to work twice as hard to communicate and also the idea that when maybe my father says something and he walks away, the idea that people are laughing because what he said is funny to them because of how he sounds crushed me when I thought about it. And the idea that I was contributing to that was hard.
At first, Hari Kondabolu’s comedy was mostly about catharsis:
“I was doing some work in detention centers and meeting families who had family members who were going to be deported,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “It was really powerful work … but it was incredibly hard and performing at night was a relief. It was cathartic. It was just a way to get things out.”
was working as an immigrant-rights organizer in Seattle and performing standup at night.
In 2008, he got his M.A. in human rights from the London School of Economics. He was surprised when his standup career took off.
Kondabolu was a writer and correspondent on Totally Biased, W. Kamau Bell’s FX political comedy series. “It was my first writing job,” Kondabolu says, “so … I have a very probably skewed vision of what writers’ rooms are because ours was so diverse and I think most of television doesn’t have that.”
Bell describes Kondabolu as “the comedy equivalent of a punk rock concert that breaks out at a human rights rally.”
Comic Hari Kondabolu’s album Waiting for 2042 is a reference to the year the Census Bureau projects whites will be the minority in the U.S. “Don’t worry, white people,” . “You were a minority when you came to this country. Things seemed to have worked out for you.”
On incorporating immigrant-rights work into his comedy
I used to do a bit where I used to read the U.S. citizenship application onstage. I think that’s part of just being overeducated and wanting to do document analysis, but I’d actually bring it onstage and read questions.
Because for people who don’t know, this is what immigrants have to go through to gain status in this country, and it’s absurd and it’s something we take for granted as American citizens.
Sometimes that was hard in a club on a Friday night and it’s 10 o’clock and everyone’s drunk and there’s a dude onstage reading a form — it’s a strange thing to read a government form in front of a bunch of drunk people.
On his explaining jokes — especially jokes about racism or colonialism
They tell you you’re never supposed to explain your jokes because that ruins the joke, and to me, that is the joke. Throughout the album — there’s a track called “Toby” where I have to explain a Roots reference. I like explaining the references.
Maybe, again, it’s me being over-educated but I do like that. I feel like I’m a cool professor. Maybe I’m not because I just called myself that. …
I find these things funny and I have to find a way for you to think they’re funny and if I have to explain it so you get what I’m talking about and then laugh at the thing that I think is funny, then so be it. It might take an extra minute.
It might mean that our attention spans have to go back to 1987 but I think it’s possible for us to get through a minute setup for us to get to something else.
Posted on: April 29, 2014
Is Israel risking to turn into an ‘apartheid state’? Only now does John Kerry realize a 65-year-old evidence?
Finally, the Palestinians recovered their senses: Fateh and Hamas buried the hatchet and decided to form a coalition government as a preliminary step toward an election.
It is the turn of Israel to lose its senses and blow its top: Israel is behaving as an irrational State that has no idea what to do next. Except punishing the Palestinians for uniting during a crucial negotiation that is dragging for an indefinite period.
Israel is now claiming that it cannot sit with Hamas, but still insists on a purely Jewish State and refuses to delimit borders.
“If a two-state solution isn’t agreed upon soon, Israel will risk becoming an apartheid state” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday while speaking before a closed forum.
Kerry used the term while speaking at the Trilateral Commission before senior officials from the United States, Europe, Russia and Japan, The Daily Beast reported.
Barak Ravidpublished this Apr. 28, 2014 in the Israeli daily Haaretz
It is the first time a U.S. official of Kerry’s importance has used the contentious term “apartheid” in the context of Israel, even if only as a warning for the future.
“A two-state solution,” Kerry said, “will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.
“Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.”
Kerry also warned that a freeze in the peace talks could bring about a violent conflagration in the West Bank. “People grow so frustrated with their lot in life that they begin to take other choices and go to dark places they’ve been before, which forces confrontation,” he said.
During his talk, a recording of which was procured by The Daily Beast, Kerry also suggested that a change in the leadership of either Israel or the Palestinians could make a breakthrough more feasable. He also reiterated his conviction that both sides share the blame for the negotiations’ dead end.
Kerry harshly criticized Israel for plans to build 14,000 new housing units in the settlements advanced during the past 9 months of negotiations.
Kerry also said that at some point he might unveil his own peace proposal, and tell both sides to either “take it or leave it.”
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in response to the tape that Kerry was simply expressing his position, which is shared by many others, and that the two-state solution is the only way Israel could remain a Jewish state that lives in peace with the Palestinians.
Psaki added that similar positions have been expressed by Israeli leaders such as Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni.
Adonis Diaries 