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.
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