The Solution To ‘The Problem With Apu’ Already Has Arrived

Are all accents inherently funny to other cultures?

College classmates of my father in Pennsylvania teased him mercilessly about his Boston accent until he lost it entirely. Even me typing Boston accent probably made you say inside your own head, “I parked my car in Harvard Yard.” Which is crazy, because parking is horrendous in Cambridge at any time of day. But go to any live comedy show outside of the Deep South, and at some point, you may hear a stand-up comedian adopt a deep Southern accent to portray their life or visits below the Mason-Dixon Line. Every once in a while, you’ll hear a comedian spout gibberish in his or her attempt to impersonate someone from a non-English speaking land.

As comedian Dana Gould tells comedian Hari Kondabolu, “There are accents that, by their nature to white Americans, sound funny. Period.”

But The Problem With Apu, Kondabolu’s new documentary (which premiered last night on truTV, and available now On Demand), is two-fold. First, that Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian owner of Springfield’s Kwik-E-Mart convenience store on The Simpsons, is voiced not by an Indian by a white American in Hank Azaria (“a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father,” Kondabolu has joked). Second, that in the 1980s and 1990s, Indian immigrants to America had no legitimate representation of their real-life experiences onscreen in TV or movies. Which means that second- and third-generation Indian-Americans have grown up with everyone else mocking them with Apu’s accent and catchphrases. So Apu has given everyone a quick and fiendish way to bully their Indian-American counterparts.

The B plot of The Problem With Apu leaves us wondering if Kondabolu will ever confront Azaria in person for his documentary. They both grew up in Queens (Kondabolu in Jackson Heights; Azaria in Forest Hills), but sharing a childhood in the most diverse part of the most diverse city is almost beside the point here. Instead, Kondabolu seeks out his fellow Indian-American comedians and actors — among them, Aziz Ansari, Kal Penn, Aasif Mandvi, Hasan Minhaj, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Aparna Nancherla, Russell Peters and Sakina Jaffrey — so they can echo his experiences to amplify them.

Kondabolu’s documentary journey began in 2012, working as a writer on FX’s late-night talk show, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, when Bell asked Kondabolu to comment on the debut of Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project on FOX. That led him to rave about how many Indian-American comedians and actors have recently shined, while also ranting about Apu and stereotypical depictions of Indians onscreen.

The documentary opens more recently, in October 2015, where a heckler at Kondabolu’s stand-up show in Denver shouts at him in an Apu voice: “Thank you come again.” Although Apu only has said that phrase eight times over the course of 28 years, it has become a catchphrase and a meme that has haunted him all this time.

It’s not just him.

Ansari told Kondabolu about one time a car pulled up alongside Aziz and his father, getting their attention just long enough to throw Apu’s voice in their faces. Every other comedian and actor Kondabolu asks had a similar story. Even the U.S. Surgeon General from 2014-2017, Dr. Vivek Murthy, reported getting bullied via Apu voices. Kal Penn, who co-starred as Taj Mahal in Van Wilder only because his agent told him it’d be good for his career, then later starred in the Harold and Kumar movies, recounted a drunk Indian man complaining to Penn about getting called Kumar all the time because of Penn. “I just looked at him and said, ‘It’s better than Apu, isn’t it?’”

Penn added: “I hate Apu, and because of that, I dislike The Simpsons.” Kondabolu still loves The Simpsons, or at least the early seasons, as most comedy nerds will argue. But not Penn. “I have never been able to divorce the two.”

“This one character created so many problems, psychologically, emotionally, for so many people,” Utkarsh Ambudkar said. “They didn’t mean for it to happen. We were just underrepresented and so we struggled.”

Ansari addressed the struggle for Indian-Americans to get recognized as real people onscreen in an episode of his series, Master of None.

The Simpsons actually has a long track record of dissing other races and ethnicities with white voices. When the character isn’t colored yellow, outside of Krusty the Clown or blues musician Bleeding Gums Murphy, it’s a white actor or actress mimicking a harsh stereotype — and often Azaria, who has even won an Emmy Award in 2003 for voicing them.

But if we wanted to talk about the problems of Akira, Bumblebee Man, Drederick Tatum, Cesar and Ugolin, Cookie Kwan, Luigi Risotto, or Opal, we’d have a much longer documentary, as well as a debate that’d inspire thousands of Reddit threads.

The documentary suggests a difference of opinion on how Azaria landed on Apu’s accent. At this point, the psychological and emotional damage has been done. Kondabolu’s own parents seemingly made peace with it long ago, and his mom teases him on camera: “You have Apu hair!”

No matter how you wished the 2016 election had gone, this year of 2017 has induced a mass reckoning, a communal woke-ness. We’re suddenly more willing to take account of past societal injustices. Right now it’s sexual harassment and abuse in the spotlight. But the timing is right for Kondabolu’s documentary and others to call us to action.

Whoopi Goldberg shares her “negrobilia” collection with Kondabolu, saying: “I’m a big believer in facing it. You got to see what it was,” adding that she doesn’t hold hard feelings for much of it. “When you deal with ignorance, how can you be pissed off? They don’t know any better.”

But Azaria does know better now, as evidenced by his quotes in a Huffington Post article a few years ago, referencing that he’d seen Kondabolu’s clip from Totally Biased. So why doesn’t he stop? In 2016, during season 27, The Simpsons did re-introduce Apu’s nephew, now voiced by Ambudkar. That’s progress, right? Well, if you watched the whole episode, and learn what Ambudkar attempted to pull off in an alternate take, then you’d know how far we still have yet to come.

“Was that just a blindspot to these people who are considered comedic geniuses?” The Daily Show‘s Minhaj wondered about Gould, Conan O’Brien and others who worked on The Simpsons.

“I feel like that still happens in writers rooms now,” Nancherla added. “Whoever sits at the table, informs the discussions.”

If you’re not hearing or seeing a diversity of voices at the table, there’s no one there to object when lines get crossed.

If nothing else, The Problem With Apu succeeds in letting Indian-Americans know they have better options now. Let’s hope white Americans realize that, too, and start looking outside of their demographic boxes to give others those options, too.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.