Teaching Notes on The Problem With Apu (2017)
[from the spring 2019 class: "New Brown America: Race and Identity in the 21st Century"]
While Hari Kondabolu was best known as a stand-up comedian, since about 2017 he’s become an example of how comedians can play an active role in shaping the serious conversations we as a society are having about race and representation. He more or less singlehandedly forced the creators and producers of The Simpsons to publicly acknowledge the harm they had done with the character “Apu.” (After a long "pause" triggered by the release of the documentary, in 2020, Hank Azaria announced he would retire the character from the show.)
Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is a character that’s been on The Simpsons since Season 1, Episode 8 (The Simpsons has been on Fox continuously since 1989!). He’s always been the proprietor of the Kwik-E-Mart, and he’s always been voiced by Hank Azaria, a white American actor who also does a number of other major characters on the show. Hari Kondabolu has been publicly criticizing the show since he did a comedy bit on Totally Biased With Kamau Bell on FXX in 2012; there was a 2013 Huffington Post article by Mallika Rao (referenced in the documentary) that followed up on that question: “Is it Time to Retire Apu?” (September 20, 2013).
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-simpsons-apu-racist_n_3956603
The show’s producers didn’t really feel much need to make any major changes in the character for the first few years after this started. They did do an episode in 2016 where Apu’s second-generation nephew criticizes him, but then continued as before with Apu.
There’s some dispute over how the character came to have an Indian accent. Writers have claimed that they wrote the clerk to be ethnically unmarked (does that mean white? It’s a bit unclear), and it was Hank Azaria’s off-the-cuff improvisation of an Indian accent that led them to commit to the character. For his part, Azaria claims he was asked by the show’s creators to do Apu in an Indian accent. How might it matter? Is the person responsible for performing the role the person critics should be targeting, or is it the writers and producers of the show who conceptualized this character and created it? Would it make a difference if an Indian person did a ‘better’ version of this comic accent?
I started hearing about this documentary while it was in progress on a podcast Hari Kondabolu was doing with the African American comedian, Politically Re-Active (That podcast is now over…). Hari mentions the podcast and interviews Kamau Bell in the documentary itself. He particularly notes that in 2016, he started urging his Twitter followers to harass Hank Azaria online and nudge him to agree to do an interview about Apu for the documentary in progress. (That pressure had an effect -- but it didn’t lead Hank Azaria to agree to be in the documentary.)
The documentary got quite a lot of publicity when it came out; Hari Kondabolu was interviewed about it in several major media venues, and there were stories in many major newspapers and magazines. Hank Azaria did go on Stephen Colbert in April 2018 and express his awareness of the growing controversy: “the most important thing is to listen to Indian people and their experience with it ... I really want to see Indian, South Asian writers in the writers' room, genuinely informing whichever direction this character takes.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/arts/television/apu-the-simpsons.html
In that interview, Azaria indicated that he would be happy to step aside and either let someone else take on the voice-over for Apu or allow the show to “transition into something new.”
“The idea that anyone, young or old, past or present, was bullied or teased based on the character of Apu, it just really makes me sad,” he said. “It was certainly not my intention. I wanted to spread laughter and joy.”
After his interview aired on Tuesday, Mr. Kondabolu tweeted: “Thank you, @HankAzaria. I appreciate what you said & how you said it.”
In October 2018, there were news stories floating around that Apu would be quietly written out of future seasons of The Simpsons, though that’s been disputed by show producers. (Update from 2020: the character is now permanently gone from the show.)
Hari Kondabolu has gotten quite a lot of flak from fans of The Simpsons for his long campaign against Apu. A lot of folks have accused him of being overly sensitive, of not being able to take a joke, and of not acknowleding all the complex storylines the writers of The Simpsons have given the character over the years (there’s almost too much to recount -- the Simpsons’ Wikipedia page gives some of the details about the plotlines involving his arranged marriage, his children, his brother and niece, and so on).
For people who are curious to explore this in greater depth, every episode of the show can be watched online at an official website, www.simpsonsworld.com.
Some episodes you might particularly want to explore include:
Season 1, Episode 8. “A Telltale Head.” Apu is tricked by Bart and friends who shoplift from his store.
Season 3, “A Streetcar Named Marge” Features Apu singing and dancing. Minstrelsry?
Season 4, “Marge vs. the Monorail.” Features Apu singing and dancing. Minstrelsry?
Season 4, “Marge in Chains.” Marge arrested after accidentally shoplifting from the Kwik-E-Mart
Season 5: “Home’s Barbershop Quartet.” Discussion of Apu’s last name. More singing and dancing.
Season 5: “Home and Apu.” Desribed as the first episode of the show dedicated entirely to Apu. Lots of material here that could potentially be offensive! But also some sympathy for Apu -- complex depiction.
Season 7: “Much Apu About Nothing.” Apu’s backstory -- he is actually a “semi-illegal alien.” He gets into immigration / visa trouble, and then passes his citizenship test. A lot of backstory about his family (all of course voiced by white actors).
Despite the rich plotlines and detailed storytelling about Apu that the show has created over the years, Kondabolu makes the point, again and again, that the voice of Apu has given people who bully South Asian Americans ammunition. He even demonstrates that in the opening clip of the documentary, when a heckler calls out “Thank you, come again” while Kondabolu is doing a bit about race. (Have any of you ever heard that? Or heard “Apu” as an insult / euphemism for an Indian immigrant?)
A point that comes up often in this conversation is why a comic Indian accent is offensive. Don’t English-speaking people from India speak in Indian accents? Yes, they obviously do. When is it offensive to mimic that accent? Is it offensive if a second-generation Indian American does that accent (as Kondabolu acknowledges he used to do when he started out in standup comedy as a teenager)?
In the documentary, Kondabolu interviews biracial, second-generation comedian Russell Peters, who argues that we shouldn’t get hung up on who does the accent; we should instead focus on intent. If the intent is part of a broader racist denigration of Indian people and Indian culture, we indeed should be offended. But if the accent is just incidental and mimetic -- the accent I am using is the accent that person speaks with -- maybe we should think before tweeting. I would add that you probably have to factor in performance -- how good is the attempt at an Indian accent?
-------------
Interesting scenes/ moments from the documentary
Opening: Hari Kondabolu on stage: “A guy came up to me after a show. He told me, ‘I think you’re really funny. That’s a big deal coming from me, I don’t usually find ethnic comedy funny.”
“Why are you saying that to my face? You could have tweeted that… But what does ethnic comedy even mean? It’s not like my whole act is, ‘Hey, brown people look like this [shows back of his hand]. White people, they look like that. [shows front of hand]”
“Thank you, come again.”
“I know you from high school, sir, even though I don’t. You’re the reason I do comedy. No one like us exists. I’m going to show up, and I’m going to be the best f****ing comic in the country, and I’m going to make less than I deserve in Denver.””
2:25 After opening credits → goes back to Totally Biased With Kamau Bell.
“More Indians in the public eye than ever before. There’s like… 14 of us now! [laughter] There’s now enough Indians that I don’t need to like you just because you’re Indian. Because growing up I had no choice but to like this. [shows Apu].”
3:45: “A white guy doing an impression… of a white guy doing my father.”
[What’s the significance of the double distancing? What might he be referring to when he says that?]
“If I saw Hank Azaria doing that voice at a party, I would kick the shit out of him… Or I would imagine kicking the shit out of him.”
----------
Kal Penn: “I hate Apu -- because of that I dislike the Simpsons.”
“I love The Simpsons because…”
“You hate yourself.”
“This whole film is about me trying to get over the fact that I hate myself.”
[Cut to panel with Hasan Minhaj, Noureen DeWulf, Aparna Nancherla, and one other actor.]
“How many of you were bullied…”
------------
7:32: Going back to 1989 -- origination of The Simpsons
9:00 Utkarsh Ambudkar: “They stereotyped everyone -- Italians, Japanese, etc. The problem is we didn’t have any other representation.”
9:45 “Apu reflected how America views us: servile, devious, goofy
Utkarsh: “And that creates a problem when the most popular show on television is showing people what an Indian is.”
10:15: Hank Azaria interviewed -- telling the version of the story that he was asked to do the Indian voice. “Can you do an Indian voice, and how offensive can you make it?”
11:00 A writer is interviewed who tells a different version of the story
12:40. Matt Groening. Nahasapeemapetilan: Bullshit (Sanskrit). The Apu Trilogy.
14:20: Mallika Rao interview -- “Is it Time to Retire Apu?”
15:30 Jackson Heights, Queens: “It is my favorite place… and every white supremacist’s nightmare.” Little India / Little South Asia. [A little primer on the Indian subcontinent]
17:45 Rancho Cucomonga. Rohitash Rao -- creator. Had a pilot on Fox in 2012.
20:28 “Racist depictions of minority groups is American as … racism.”
20:55 Whoopi Goldberg: Minstrelsy. “Minstrel shows began when white people decided they wanted to do the cakewalk.” “Negrobilia”
23:22: If he’s singing and dancing, it’s a minstrel show.
28:20: Kal Penn recounting the story of how he got the role “Taj Mahal” in Van Wilder. 2002. Indian exchange student with a comic Indian accent. (Kal Penn normally speaks with an American accent.)
29:26 “Patanking” -- Sakina Jaffrey. “Being asked to speak in a broad Indian accent with broad acting.”
30:00 Hank Azaria. References the 7-11 clerk. Peter Sellers in brownface in The Party. There is a pretty painful legacy of brownface and yellowface performance in the American media.
30:45 Aasif Mandvi. "It’s ok if I do the accent -- it’s part of my cultural heritage."
31:15 Russell Peters using an Indian accent as part of his standup routine.
31:40. Peters: “Don’t get caught up on color. Don’t get caught up in the words. Get caught up in the intent.”
33:10 Dana Gould. Writer and Co-Producer Season 1-8
34:30 Hari starts talking about his own early performance as a teenager -- including comic Indian accent! “I milked it as much as I could. Every corny joke about race, convenience stores, taxis, curry… It was awful. I did it for five years… and then 9/11 happened.”
39:15 Hasan Minhaj -- Conan O’Brien, Dana Gould. “Was that just like a blind spot for these people who are considered to be comedic geniuses?”
39:40 Aparna Nancherla
39:55 Aasif Mandvi: “It’s hard for me to blame the actor.”
42:30 Utkarsh Ambudkar. Apu’s nephew. In season 27 -- 2016.
“I just b***-slapped your Kwik-E-Mart into the 21st century.”
44:00 “Did you ever feel any regret?” Hari: “Uh yeah. When I watched it… The Simpsons wins. And I wanted to win. The Simpsons: Stop complaining! We do this to everyone. ”
45:37 Hari: “He gets to choose how he wants to be portrayed. What a privilege. He gets to choose how he’s seen by other people. So f***-ing ironic.”