Back when Jon Stewart announced he was leaving The Daily Show, everyone had opinions about who would best fill his chair. (We listed a bunch of them.) One that not many people talked about, though, was Hari Kondabolu, a New York standup who in hindsight looks more and more like a perfect fit for the show. Born and raised in Queens, Kondabolu attended Wesleyan and Bowdoin, earned a Masters in Human Rights from the London School of Economics, and worked as an activist in Seattle before getting into comedy. And it’s a good thing he found his way into that world: he’s the best political standup comedian working today, with pop culture tastes that see him blend bits about Weezer and Back to the Future with discussions of healthcare, police violence, and the changing racial makeup of the United States.
Over the past four years, Kondabolu's career has seen a sharp uptick. He was a writer on W. Kamau Bell’s FX series Totally Biased, made the rounds on late-night shows, got his own Comedy Central half-hour special, and released a debut standup album Waiting for 2042, on legendary independent label Kill Rock Stars. Now, Kondabolu has added to his workload: not only are he and Bell co-hosting a new podcast, Politically Reactive, but his second album, Mainstream American Comic, comes out this Friday—perfectly timed between the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The record is a mix of social topics that make him particularly angry (eroding access to healthcare for women), turns of phrase that don’t make sense (“Boys will be boys”), and for the first time, topical political humor—including bits about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and even Bobby Jindal. He spoke with WIRED about the album, how he uses Twitter, and upcoming television projects.
WIRED: You recorded the album in January. Is the material still timely to you after six months, or will it seem like a time capsule after this year?
Hari Kondabolu: Some of the themes have unfortunately survived time, like police brutality, general racism and sexism, or a discussion of the Illuminati. It’s pretty evergreen. The one worry was the Bobby Jindal stuff. I haven’t done it since the album recording, but my unique relationship with it—both because of me being an Indian-American and that Twitter campaign—made it more than just an election joke. That one has a personal investment. The Hillary, Bernie, Trump stuff, those are really mild jokes. I wasn’t sure who was going to win the nomination, so I was kind of careful—the only unfortunate thing was I wasn’t really able to drill Trump the way I would now.
On your new podcast with W. Kamau Bell, Politically Reactive, it’s mostly reasonable discussions with guests. Your standup contains much more of your frustration with the slow progress of the world. How do you approach those differently?
In standup you cut the fat, and sometimes that’s the juiciest, most informative part, but the goal is jokes and laughter. If it lacks those things it’s not standup. A podcast is fairly freeform, we’ve added structure and it’s well-produced, but we have room to go in any direction we want to go in. There’s a goal in mind to be funny, informative, and not to drag on.
How has your background working in an around politics before becoming a comedian helped inform what you talk about on stage now?
I was an intern for Hillary Clinton when she was a senator in New York, and I interned for her in DC as a college student. That experience as a kid doesn’t really inform me at all. The stuff that does inform me is the post-9/11 backlash against brown people, the government’s response both in terms of deportations and war abroad. My activism around those issues, especially working as an immigrant rights organizer, those are the things that inform my point of view and voice more than anything. I’m interested in coded messaging and why people say what they say and what the purpose is. Sometimes I wonder, “Am I just a funny professor who has found a way to scam the American public into thinking I’m a comedian?” I’ve found a way to talk about the things I want to talk about—with some depth, given the limitations of standup.
Your Bobby Jindal bit, which turned into #BobbyJindalIsSoWhite on Twitter, was a combination of comedy and activism that was so successful that the Jindal campaign framed it as “liberal media.”
I definitely didn’t do that as a source of activism. I mostly did it because I hate him. I don’t like what he stands for, and as an Indian American I don’t like the story that he’s sharing with the world. He wants people to assimilate and I don’t believe in assimilation. I believe in integration. I knew it would be something for Brown Twitter, or Indian Twitter, or South Asian Twitter, but the fact that it was trending in India certainly wasn’t a goal.
Conversations happening in Twitter subgroups like those can get retweeted and end up in the timelines of people who would otherwise never see what’s being talked about. Do those conversations help awareness or does it inspire more hatred?
I’m learning things whenever something trends on Black Twitter—it’s not a discussion happening in my circles. The mainstream media talks about what white people are thinking about around the country. What are they buying, what are they consuming, what’s popular? They don’t frame it that way, but when you look at who they cover to represent the country, that’s what happens. So for the rest of us we’ve had to learn about what mainstream white America likes, thinks, and values.
Twitter actually gives everybody else a look into our values and what are the big issues in our communities. For a lot of people who aren’t used to that, it’s frustrating. In 10 or 15 years I don’t think it’s going to be this way, but it’s still interesting to see people implode when they’re exposed to other communities and things they don’t know about firsthand.
Do you think you get more online ire than other comedians? I feel like you or Larry Wilmore get more anger thrown at them than say, John Oliver, Jim Jeffries, or Samantha Bee.
And if you’re a women or LGBTQ, that multiplies the reaction. I said something in response to “All Lives Matter” a few years ago—that if you think all lives matter, what about private prisons, or terrible healthcare, or homelessness? And somebody made it into a meme and it got passed around. With the recent shootings of civilians by police I decided to repost it; the next thing I know, I’m getting death threats. It’s not just, “I disagree with you, let me have a discussion and counter your argument with my own.” It’s a certain kind of ugliness and fear mongering, racist and violent response that is very undemocratic.
I think I get that more than comics who aren’t minorities. If we speak up, it becomes this bigger thing. And I honestly think with the Trump campaign, there’s a certain type of maniac who is empowered. I’m not saying all Trump voters are maniacs, but there’s a certain kind of maniac who’s in that camp, who all of a sudden feels empowered to say they’re being persecuted by people of color, by the system that preaches diversity. These fringe thoughts all of a sudden become mainstream.
How do you handle the transitions from explicitly political material in your act to something like the bit “Nocturnal Emissions,” which is much more scatological humor?
[Laughs.] It’s hard to separate the political and the personal to me, because I’m not thinking, "I’m going to make this salient political point." It’s more that this bothers me, and I’m talking about it. The way a quote-unquote observational comic is going to see something, I’m going to see the same thing and go a different way. So somebody says, “What’s the deal with stickers on football helmets? What’s with that design?” Where I’d wonder about what’s going to happen in terms of concussions and whether the NFL is going to really give fair deals for healthcare for players. It’s not like I’m choosing one or the other, it’s just automatic. Also, I like dirty jokes. My favorite comedian in the world, Stuart Lee, said “there’s nothing funnier than a fart” on his first special. That’s a universal truth. There’s something to be said for that.
You've got a lot of irons in the fire right now—in addition to the podcast an album, you have a pilot for TruTV, and this fall they're also airing documentary you made about Apu from The Simpsons.
Being friends with W. Kamau Bell is inspiring—because he’s done things his own way, and now he’s on his second show (United Shades of America) and he’s got an Emmy nomination. I’ve had tunnel vision before, but I’m doing five things at once now, and Kamau does that. He does a ton of projects and has a wife and kids. It makes me want to work harder. I’m one of the new co-hosts of The Bugle, one of the people replacing John Oliver on that podcast. So between the movie, the show, the podcasts, and this album, it’s a lot of things.
Are all of those projects aimed at different niches?
Chris Rock was the executive producer on Totally Biased, and he would tell us that with everything he did, he thought about if people would still come see his standup. I’m focused on each project, but the part of me that’s thinking forward is the part of me that’s thinking: Can I fill bigger venues? Will more people come to watch my standup?
Sometimes you watch a comedian and they get laughs on a joke that they wouldn’t have gotten laughs on a decade ago. And it’s not that the joke isn’t funny, it’s that there’s a context there now, and you don’t need to set everything up. It makes it so much easier to go further with ideas. Of course I want that. It doesn’t need to be giant stadiums—I just want people who give a shit about what I give a shit about to come out and watch me do what I do.
