Professional funny guy, Hari Kondabolu. Photo Courtesy of Reed College.
Hari Kondabolu stood at the front of Kaul Auditorium, squinting through spotlights to the edges of the half-full crowd.
“This space is too big,” he said into the microphone. “Comedy needs lower roofs, smaller spaces.” A popular figure in today’s comedy scene—he’s performed on Letterman, Conan, and Comedy Central—Kondabolu has no qualms taking potshots at his audience in the name of a joke.
“I know it’s Portland, and it’s a liberal arts institution,” he quipped after an especially inflammatory joke. “You’re here to feel terrible.”
On Wednesday, the Brooklyn-raised Indian-American comedian brought his unique, abrasively political brand of comedy to Kaul as part of a community event sponsored by the Multicultural Resource Center. His 90-minute set hit on a number of touchy subjects, including race, gender, and socioeconomic status, juxtaposing the heavier subject matter with a repertoire of straightforwardly scatological gags.
“I hope you all appreciate my jokes about racism and sexism,” he said, deadpan, “but that doesn’t pay the bills. So I make cum jokes.”
A common thread in Kondabolu’s jokes was the frustrating dichotomy of his experiences growing up in Queens—“the most diverse place in the world, apparently”—and moving to Maine for his undergrad at Bowdoin, which promised him a “surge of diversity,” a claim it was unable to uphold. “Portland, Maine—for those of you who don’t know—makes Portland, Oregon look like Oakland in terms of race,” he said. Later that night, during the Q&A following his set, he delved into more extensive detail about his experience being a visible minority at a majority-white college. “[Queens is] a different context [than Bowdoin],” he said. “One makes you feel like an outsider, one makes you feel included.”
Notoriously political in his subject matter, Kondabolu is eager to air his political ties and affiliations—he describes (disparagingly) his experience at a Hillary Clinton rally, casually brings up his friendship with the Surgeon General (“The Indian Illuminati isn’t very big”), and devotes a long section of his set to his experience meeting Joe Biden at the Vice President’s home.
The political barbs of his comedy are an important element of his set, even when less obvious. Asked by an audience member how he drew the line between being wilfully subversive and taking “responsibility for [his] words,” he said: “Being subversive and taking responsibility for your words are not necessarily mutually exclusive.” With that said, he added, “It’s only subversive if it functions as a joke. [There’s] a line between political preaching—you know, being ‘that guy’—and making art.”
Being NYU’s APA Institute’s Artist in Residence for the 2014–2015 academic year, Kondabolu has strong feelings about comedy as an artform, specifically about how important honest self-presentation is to the integrity of his comedy. “I don’t believe in the thing, like ‘Words don’t mean anything, it’s just a joke’—Like, if you’re gonna be a piece of shit and you don’t mean any of it—I can’t respect that, because I don’t know who you are!”
Kondabolu ended the show on an empathetic note, reminding students of the importance of self-care, jokingly referencing the fact that Jesus Christ found time to throw a dinner party the night before he was crucified.