DC’s Comedy Oasis in Trump Era
Oswalt, Kondabolu, Gethard headline cutting-edge festival
A comic’s dilemma: “What can you add satirically that tops what Trump just said?”
With every day’s headlines bringing a fresh nightmare of what’s widely seen as Trumpian treason, lies and racism, it’s an especially welcome shelter from the storm that Hari Kondabolu is offering at this week’s three-day Kennedy Center “District of Comedy Festival,” joined by such established headliners as Patton Oswalt and rising cutting-edge comedians. It’s reassuring that our democracy is still strong enough that a federal arts center partially subsidized by taxpayer funds — at least for now — is able to offer such an array of unvarnished truth-tellers knocking down conventional pieties with unshackled language and irreverence, even if most of the comics at the festival aren’t primarily political. They include Chris Gethard, who hosts an antic yet inspirational talk show on TruTV and who combines hilarious and poignant story-telling in his recent smash one-man show about depression and recovery, Career Suicide, filmed for HBO; and the outrageously bawdy Bridget Everett and 2 Dope Queens’ Phoebe Robinson, who takes an acerbic look at everything from racism to romance, who headline Friday night’s “Riot!: A Celebration of Women in Comedy.”
Kondabolu, an Indian-American, shares with Robinson a strong interest in using comedy to highlight everyday racism, but his comic attack takes a wider look at underlying systemic barriers and historical forces, while remaining true to the comic’s primary goal: getting laughs. A former writer with the ground-breaking Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, he first made his mark in 2014 with the album Waiting for 2042, the year when white people were predicted by the Census Bureau to become the new minority, stoking white fears. But, as he pointed out, racial minorities aren’t a united front: “It’s not 49 percent white people and 51 percent ‘you people.’ One of his lines even became a rallying cry during protests over the New York City police chokehold killing of Eric Garland: “Saying that I’m obsessed with race and racism in America,” he said, “is like saying that I’m obsessed with swimming while I’m drowning.” His comedy, though, isn’t built on sloganeering but on closely observed human foibles and story-telling, as when he opened his 2014 Letterman set with the tale of his father — actually a physician who is the head of a medical lab — being mistaken for a cab driver when he picked up his son at the airport, with Hari pushed aside by a white woman who got into the “cab” first.
Yet even as those commonplace biases remain as entrenched today when Kondabolu joked about them during the Obama years, the life-threatening dangers posed by racism have escalated dramatically with the rise of hate crimes and open bigotry — along with the norm-busting slide into authoritarianism — unleashed by Donald Trump. Kondabolu observes, with mock nostalgia, in his well-received new Netflix special, Warn Your Relatives, “Remember the good old days when we thought Joe Biden was a loose cannon?”
But contrary to the myth held by some of his fans that Trump’s ascent must be welcomed as good for business for today’s comedians, Kondabolu and other liberal comics with a conscience reject that facile assumption. As he told me in an interview: “It’s a very scary time. For me, it’s hard to be funny all the time when I’m scared to death.” He added, “The old adage is tragedy plus time equals comedy, but every single day, in terms of what’s going on globally, the agreements we’re pulling out of, and the way America is going very quickly downhill, each time one of those things happens, like a shooting, there is no time for the tragedy to become funny. We’re on to the next thing already.” And for a joke craftsman such as Kondabolu, Trump’s non-stop tirades and outrages pose a special challenge: “What can you add? Like I said in the special, he kind of does the work for you. With Trump, it goes to such a level of absurdity, it’s hard to add creativity to that. What can you possibly do satirically on a regular basis that can top what he just said?” (You can hear the phone interview here and here, even if the audio also includes the background sound of my typing notes.)
Yet in his new special and in the considerable amount of new material he’s bringing to the Kennedy Center and as part of a tour that began in the spring, his sharp-eyed observations of our biases and political failings remain intact, but he’s also adding more personal touches. These including retelling the encounters he’s experienced with his new-found fame, such as being heckled by Tracy Morgan, and building an elaborate PR fantasy involving the handful of other Indian-American celebrities, such as Mindy Kaling, based on one unique ethnic trait he’s willing to admit: Indians’ love of mangoes.
At the same time, he refrains from engaging in a common trope employed by most comedian offspring of immigrant parents: he doesn’t do his parents’ accents in bits about them. That’s in contrast, for instance, to one of his comedic heroes who inspired him to become a comedian as a teenager , Margaret Cho. “Everybody I saw do stand-up on television was primarily black or white, so seeing her as an Asian-American, I realized we had things in common. I never heard anyone talk the way she did about her family, and that her family and her experience was just as valid as anyone else’s. That was incredibly empowering when I was 14,15, 16 years old, I didn’t have any role models in comedy. It made me feel like this was possible,” he recalled.
Yet even as Cho continues to wring big laughs from mimicking her mother’s accent, the rise in anti-immigrant prejudice after 9/11 led him to rethink his use of accents. He said, “As I got older, I wondered whether I was being laughed at by the audience or with the audience. I began to think about what I’m saying and the impact of laughter, and that representation counted: As a young brown man, I knew I had an opportunity with people to shape them.” He was also deeply inspired by the honest comedy of Richard Pryor and Pryor’s comrade-in-arms, Paul Money: “ I saw him perform at the DC Improv in the summer of 2013 for two or three hours, and I never laughed harder. It’s hard to be that blunt, to show that kind of courage, and he did not care what white people thought about him.”
Kondabolu’s rage at ethnic stereotyping went up another level in his 2017 documentary The Problem With Apu that took hard aim at the leading representation of South Asians in the media: the cartoon character Apu from The Simpsons, voiced by the white actor Hank Azaria. Even though he was a fan of the show, none of the key Simpsons’ actors or writers would talk to him for the film. Yet the documentary forced Azaria to admit on Stephen Colbert’s show he now realized how it could be offensive and how he might even step away from the role, a response Kondabolu welcomed. But it also prompted The Simpsons this year to strike back in ham-handed fashion with an episode that used Lisa Simpson’s character to attack “political correctness,” an episode that sparked a backlash. Kondabolu critiqued the show’s response as “sad,” and issued a mock public statement: “I just want to say, ‘Congratulations to the Simpsons for being talked about & being seen as relevant again.” Kondabolu won the PR battle, but he’s moved on since then and doesn’t talk much about the national debate he sparked.
(The controversy is still raw: In today’s New York Times, Matt Groening, the Simpsons creator, shot back at the points about Apu made in Kondabolu’s documentary, decrying the debate as “tainted.” He said, “ “I’m proud of what we do on the show. And I think it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended.”
Meanwhile, Kondabolu continued to address important political topics in a smart way that also delivers laughs each step of the way throughout his routines, a feat more impressive than, as Tracy Morgan advised him to do, “talk about licking women’s’ assholes,” as he recounts in his new special. Like rating an Olympic gymnast, Kondabolu’s bits deserve high marks for both degree of difficulty and execution. A perfect example is in his special when he dares to tackle the often dull issue of health care, even mentioning the “public option” from the stage and describing how our political process weakens all good ideas. Yet it’s not a lecture and the routine keeps building in more laughs, as he ramps up the bit’s impact by eventually invoking the prospect of harvesting the organs of rich white people as a possible “modest proposal.” As Kondabolu explained to me, “If you think about it, going without universal health care is absurd, but talking about it can sound too wonky, heavy-handed and boring. So you need to raise the stakes to show horrific it is that people are dying by having a joke about eating rich people,” building to an unexpected punch line that, he justly observes, “delivers on the promise of the routine.”
He, too, is delivering on the promise of his earlier work as a social and political critic , adding warmer, more personalized notes along with daring meta-comedy about the routines we’re seeing unfold before us. That comedic commentary in the middle of his set is extra icing on the cake for his fans, but it’s rarely done as well outside of the work of Andy Kindler and the alternative comedy British pioneer, Stewart Lee.
It’s little wonder that The New York Times praised his new special in glowing terms: “It was an artistic breakthrough for him, an incisively funny and formally adventurous hour that reveals a comic in command of his powers.” Now fans of smart comedy will get to see him in top form at the Kennedy Center this week, joining other inventive comics, such as the erudite, charismatic Baron Vaughn and the ultimate meta-comedian, the fictionalized, washed- up hack “Neil Hamburger,” all offering a welcome respite from the depressing news coming from the nearby Trump White House.
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SAMPLING SOME OF THE BEST COMICS AT THE COMEDY FESTIVAL:
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Art Levine is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly,and author of the recently published book, Mental Health, Inc: How Corruption, Lax Oversight and Failed Reforms Endanger Our Most Vulnerable Citizens.
