Hari Kondabolu wants you to know that he loves The Simpsons. Seriously. But he has a bone to pick with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon—or at least the way the character is portrayed. Because as smart as the perennial, 32-time Emmy-winning sitcom is, Apu is “based on a fundamental flaw, a stereotype,” says Kondabolu. “Everything is through the lens of a white person’s perception of an Indian immigrant. It’s the same jokes: India has over a billion people, something about curry, gods with many arms and elephants’ heads, arranged marriage.”
Though the show has grown and evolved over the past 29 years, Apu himself, in most ways, has not. He’s also voiced by actor and voice artist Hank Azaria, who happens to be white. (He’s of Sephardic Jewish descent; his grandparents on both sides were born in Greece.)
Kondabolu, a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and filmmaker, digs deep into why Apu matters in his new documentary, The Problem with Apu, which airs on TruTV November 19. The movie examines the character’s origins, as well as the shadow he’s cast over people of South Asian descent, especially American-born twenty- and thirtysomethings like Kondabolu—people who grew up in a culture that offered few South Asian examples beyond Apu.
Kondabolu’s documentary originated as a piece he performed as a writer on W. Kamau Bell’s Totally Biased in 2012, after Bell asked Kondabolu to write something about Indian representation in the pop culture. Initially, Kondabolu was reluctant because he thought the issue was stale. But Bell made a point that resonated with him: “Kamau said, ‘You and your community have talked about this for so many years that you think this is a thing everybody knows. But nobody has thought about this. Nobody’s talked about it—and a South Asian person certainly hasn’t talked about it,’” he remembers. Then Bell told him, “If you don’t do this, I will fire you.” He was joking, but Kondabolu did the segment anyway.
The piece ended up going viral. According to Kondabolu, teachers still use the video to teach high school and college students about stereotypes. “I think it clearly resonated, and the thing in particular that really resonated was the Apu part,” he says.
As a kid, Kondabolu didn’t have a Mindy Kaling or an Aziz Ansari or a Kal Penn to look up to—and neither did Kaling, Ansari, or Penn themselves. For much of film and TV history, South Asian characters were rare; when they appeared at all, they were often played by white performers in brownface, like Peter Sellers as the bumbling Indian actor Hrundi V. Bakshi in the 1968 comedy The Party.
Then came 1989. As Kondabolu puts it in his film: “The Simpsons was created, and my life was never the same again.”
The show’s portrayal of Apu—a thickly accented convenience-store owner—didn’t just affect Kondabolu. As the many Indian actors, voice artists, and others whom he interviews in The Problem with Apu agree, it made life difficult for them, too. For example: in nearly 30 years of The Simpsons, Apu has only said, “Thank you. Come again,” eight times. But nearly each person interviewed said that this phrase was used to mock them when they were growing up.
“At the end of the day, that character wasn’t really going after me and my friends,” says Kondabolu. “It was really going after people who are much more vulnerable, which are my parents, immigrants, and people who are able to control their image even less than we are. I still haven’t seen an Indian-immigrant convenience store, taxi driver, or gas-station attendant character with depth, with a story, talking about a working-class life”—on film, anyway.”
Another story line throughout the film is Kondabolu’s furtive quest—à la Michael Moore’s Roger & Me—to get Azaria himself to participate in the doc. Although Azaria ultimately decided not to appear, he did tell Kondabolu, in an e-mail, “I think what you’re doing is great.” Still, Kondabolu wants to have a conversation with Azaria in a public forum. “I think that would be really useful for people,” he says.
As for Apu, Kondabolu hopes that The Simpsons will make some changes, and soon. “I think the lazy thing to do is kill him off,” or to go the “it was all a dream” route, says Kondabolu. Instead, perhaps the show could make amends by giving Apu more depth and interiority: “Give him some upward mobility. Perhaps create a character that can oppose Burns,” Springfield’s resident evil billionaire. “The other things you could do is—he has kids, just let them talk. Let them be part of the show. Have them represent us. Have writers who can write to that voice.”
“My honest opinion is that I don’t really care what happens to Apu, because it’s been 30 years. I’m an adult, and the people I interviewed are adults,” says Kondabolu. That said: “The Simpsons is a brilliant show. It goes after popular culture. What’s more of a Simpsons move than going after The Simpsons?”
