While nearly everyone shut down their lives during the COVID-19 epidemic, comedian Hari Kondabolu found his life was opening new doors he never expected. He and his wife had a surprise pregnancy that turned their lives upside down, and living that adventure inspired him to create his latest one-hour special, “Vacation Baby,” which he regards as his most personal material ever.
Known mostly for his sociopolitical comedy, Kondabolu will be bringing the personal and the political together for four shows June 2 and 3 at the Den Theatre. For the Brooklyn-based comic, these appearances will take him back to the roots of the new special.
“I was at the Den last year for one of the final warm-ups before I recorded the special. Probably the most important week of developing the material because Roe v. Wade got overturned while I was there, and my whole show is about having a kid during the pandemic,” recalls Kondabolu. “As a comic who talks about big issues and cares about the world and who was devastated to hear that Roe v. Wade got overturned, I had to talk about it because it was talking about our choice to have a child that we didn’t expect.
“I ended up writing stuff about Roe v. Wade, and I had to record less than a week later. So it ended up being like this really kind of incredible, tense, frustrating time for everybody. But also creatively it was like, ‘Wow, how do I include this?’ Because we have to. It would be wrong not to.”
Kondabolu, forty, grew up in Queens and always enjoyed being funny, but he was drawn to working for immigrant rights as he launched a career in that field in Seattle working for now-Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. Stand-up was a hobby for him then, as he had no examples to follow of successful Indian and South Asian comedians, but he got picked to perform at the HBO Comedy Festival in 2007.
Parlaying that into an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” he found himself walking a tightrope between his serious work and his funny aspirations. But as the comedic breaks kept coming, he finally decided at the end of 2008 to make a real go of performing.
A key figure in his development was his best friend and fellow comic W. Kamau Bell, who started his career in Chicago and went on to bring Kondabolu on as a writer and correspondent for his FX talk show “Totally Biased.” The pair now cohost the popular “Politically Reactive” podcast, and the connections helped him hone his voice and see how to bring it to an audience beyond clubs.
But it was a documentary called “The Problem with Apu”—an expansive critique of how “The Simpsons” portrayed Indian convenience store owner Apu stereotypically—that really put him on the map in 2017. Kondabolu had initially taken on the topic on “Totally Biased,” but knew that there was much more to say about the portrayal of Indians and South Asians as stereotypes.
“I started to realize that this point of view has not really been shared, and I was like ‘What if we did a deep dive into it with the story of how the character was developed and talked with well-known South Asians in the public sphere about how they felt about it?’,” he explains. I knew it was a bigger thing than just a small pop-cultural thing, at least for our community, because that was our only depiction. It just seemed like the natural thing to do as a comedian who’s looking for interesting things to talk about that affect lots of people.”
Ultimately, Kondabolu wants audiences to know they’ll be in good, funny hands when they attend the weekend’s shows.
“At the end of the day, if they’re not laughing, it doesn’t really matter what I went in with,” says Kondabolu. “The job is not to educate, it’s to make people laugh. And if you fail at that, there’s no point at all. I will definitely bring the laughs.”
Hari Kondabolu performs at 7:15pm and 9:30pm June 2 and 3 at the Den Theatre, 1331 North Milwaukee, (773)697-3830, thedentheatre.com.
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