Hari Kondabolu is a vacation daddy

By Brian Braiker

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Hari Kondabolu is an astute observer on race and racial politics, a writer and filmmaker, a Brooklynite, a very funny stand-up and, most recently a dad. His latest special is out this week on YouTube. Filmed right here in Gowanus at the Bell House, “Vacation Baby” is some of his more personal work to date. In it, he discusses the surreal nature of having a baby in the middle of a global pandemic and, as a first generation American child of immigrant parents himself, what to name him. Filmed days after Roe v. Wade was overturned, though, he leaves nothing on the table in terms of his biting political humor. Here he dives into anti-Asian crimes and pulls no punches on “white replacement theory.” But also keeps it light and silly.

This week on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” we sit down with Kondabolu, who you may know from his many appearances on Conan or Letterman or Kimmel, his stints on “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me or his Chris Rock produced FX show “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.” Maybe you saw his documentary “The Problem with Apu” about the two-dimensional minstrelsy of the Simpsons character, or his Netflix special “Warn Your Relatives.”

Kondabolu lives in Brooklyn with his partner and his vacation baby and we get into what all of that means, growing up in Queens, considering a career in human rights work and more.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. You can listen to it in its entirety in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

You and I are actually neighbors.
Basically it’s Park Slope, more or less. When I moved to Park Slope, more or less, it was 13 years ago and I was in my late twenties and it was weird just because I didn’t have kids. I was under 30. I feel like the neighborhood suited me. It was quiet, which I like. It was near a train; the park was across the street. I’m like, this is easy enough. This works for me. And it was very different than my brother. My brother still lives in South Williamsburg and that fits his personality a lot more than mine. So it feels like I grew into this neighborhood. I started and it didn’t make sense and now I have a partner and a kid. It’s exactly what I did not have and everyone else had when I moved in, so I adapted.

I moved to the Park Slope, more or less, when I was 27 and I was shocked by the roving packs of teens. It was like little clusters of teenagers and sometimes as late as 10, 11 o’clock just roving the neighborhood. And now I have two of those. I understand how that happens, whereas at the time I was like, this is totally foreign.
What is embarrassing is that when I see those roving group of teenagers, I’m just as scared as I was when I was a kid. “They’re going to pick on me.” I’m 40-years-old, they’re like 15, but there’s still that same, “No, the big kids are going to pick on me! Oh, no.”

Yeah, eyes down. Don’t make eye contact.
Don’t make eye contact! That’s like a very basic New York lesson. Avoid eye contact unless you’re really sure that you’re just going to be met with a smile and not some vicious attack. I was born and raised here in New York and so my relationship with the city certainly has changed a lot over time. But one consistent thing, regardless of neighborhood and my age was don’t make eye contact. Never been stabbed. Never been stabbed.

You yourself, have a kid now, a future teen that will be roving the streets of Park Slope, more or less. How’s it going? How old is he now?
Two-and-a-half. It’s going well. Some challenges, some things have gotten easier, some things have gotten harder. He loves the word “no,” which has been brutal. It’s weird at times where I get so frustrated with him and I’m like, “Yeah, he’s two. He’s two. He’s saying sentences and words he doesn’t even know what they mean.” I say, “Don’t hit me,” and he hits me and I get angry. I’m like, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He thinks it’s a game.” You have to be reminded that everything is so new for him, that there is no context. His memory is so limited. He’s following your lead as much as he wants to.

He’s learning the boundaries. He’s seeing how far he can push the envelope. What does this tone of voice mean compared to that tone of voice?
What’s weird as a parent of this era, what always worked for me was the fear of getting hit. Not to say that was good and not to say that I was beaten. It wasn’t like a “We’re going to teach you a lesson. Go to the backyard, find a switch.” It wasn’t like one of those situations, luckily. I got smacked enough times where I’m like, that was a fear. It’s certainly not something I want to do with my child and certainly not something I particularly loved. Though I understand from my parents’ perspective, you’re figuring it out. It’s different place. I get so much now. It’s hard to be a parent in general, it’s hard to know what to do. Because so much of it is based on some weird sense memory of how it was for you and then reminding yourself it’s not that way anymore.

So for me it’s like, “Well how do you set boundaries without that?” In some ways it forces you to be a complete person and think through things. Because when you have violence, it’s an easy answer. “Well, this will stop it.” The idea that I have to be really critical, it also forces me to really understand my kid. Why is he doing this? What is the purpose? What am I doing that is making this something he feels he can do? As opposed to threatened violence: I’ve learned nothing. Only thing he’s learned is that people hit you.

People who don’t have kids would be shocked to hear someone say, “One of my instincts is to smack them.”
It’s a hard thing. It’s there.

It’s a hundred percent there. And what you were saying is interesting because, it sounds like a Hallmark thing, but as much as you’re there to teach kids, you really do learn about yourself and your limits.
Absolutely. And also I learned like, wow, the fact that’s in me, what does that say? That’s the part that’s been hardest to me is how do I create boundaries? My tone of voice works sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. I tell him to sleep. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not going to be consistent and need to accept that. But at a certain point, you run out of answers.

You’re doing this with a partner. What have you learned about her in this process? Or what does she bring to the table that you don’t or vice versa when it comes to parenting?
She’s much more patient. She’s an incredible mom. It’s not that she doesn’t hit her points where she’s like, “Just take him. Please take him.” That happens to both of us. But [she has an] ability to stick through it and just keep repeating and keep making sure something is clear. Also, she’s on the ground with him. She’s much more physical with him. I wasn’t a kid who was particularly physical and horse playing, that wasn’t my thing. My mother-in-law who’s a pediatrician, she said, “You got to remember it’s not about what you like. It’s not about what you want to do. This is how your kid communicates. This is what he wants. And so if you’re going to reach him, you have to literally go down to his level.”

I’ve had to learn. Kid wants you to draw with them, and you have work to do? The reason he wants you to draw another car is not because he wants to see another car. He wants you to spend time with him. He wants to know that my daddy’s here and he’s playing with me.

And you don’t want him to grow up to write “Cat’s in the Cradle” about you.
My fear is he’s going to write something about “Daddy was always on his cell phone. He loved the cell phone more than me.”

Your special, “Vacation Baby,” is some of your more personal material as far as I can tell to date. You’re getting into fatherhood and you’re getting into family more and more. Is that deliberate or is that your world is that now? Where do you pick and choose how personal you get?
It’s a little bit of both because for years now I’ve talked about being more personal in my act and going deeper. I made some strides in my Netflix special [“Warn Your Relatives”]. There was a few more personal pieces, but I still kept some healthy distance. I talked about my family a bit more. For years I steered away from those things. One, because this separation between private and public and also especially talking about family, it was so stigmatized for somebody with immigrant parents to talk about their parents. “Oh, that’s hacky. Oh, how typical. You’re using something easy.” So I fell into that. Was afraid to even go near that. And then all of a sudden I’m like, “All these white guys are talking about their parents. Their parents might not have accents, but they’re still talking about their parents.” It’s almost like it’s a fundamental part of the human existence, your relationship with your parents, and then you start to realize it’s almost like, “Well, they can’t use that tool the way I use it, so they complain about it. I don’t use accents.”

I was going to say that. Yeah,
Partly because I don’t do them well, first of all. And secondly just, yeah, it doesn’t seem worth it to me. If a joke is funny on its own, that should do it. And my mom is funny because she’s funny because she’s witty. And so to me that’s the key thing. But to even go into that world was a step. I’ve wanted to go deeper. I’ve wanted to bleed a bit more on stage. A lot of comics start with the personal because it’s the most accessible. It’s the thing they know, and then they might go into bigger topics after. And I went the opposite way. I started with the bigger topics. I almost felt comfortable with that distance. And now it’s like, “No, let’s push.” And having a kid was something that pushed me. Having a kid during a pandemic pushed me even more.

So I really wanted to write about it. And at the same time, how do I write about it in a way that doesn’t fall into the tropes that we see a lot of comics fall into with, “Oh now they’re a parent, that’s all they’re going to talk about. And it’s going to be stuff that I expect and it’s going to be dad humor.” And the thing I have to remind myself is I’ve written jokes about airport security and I still think that’s actually clever how I talked about it basically being a shopping mall and just how it’s all capitalism or just the Illuminati.

Or you’re in London and the airport security are Sikhs.
Exactly. I feel proud of that because I found a topic that’s been done to death and I found my own spin on it that no one’s ever done. And so the same is true with parenting. I am not the same as any parent. And certainly “My kid said this wild thing” is something that’s there. You want to say it but you have to really think is what they said all that interesting? Is it just interesting because you’re a parent or is it interesting because the thing they said was shockingly brilliant or poetic and not because they intended to but because their words are limited, so everything sounds like poetry.

I’m thinking back to the comics that I’ve liked on parenthood. My kids are probably slightly younger than Louis C.K.’s kids. When he was doing bits on parenting when they were younger, when he was still not canceled, it was brilliant. The earlier bits were brilliant. And growing up I was obsessed with Bill Cosby, the show and the special “Himself.” I guess what I’m asking, should I be worried about you, 10 years from now, some big secret coming out?
Apparently. The people that talk about family the most are the ones you got to look out for. It’s funny because with them it’s a weird thing where the work is still good.

Materials’ brilliant. It still is.
You can still learn from it. Louis C.K.’s parenting stuff, I mean, one of the first bits I saw him do, because I used to go to the Comedy Cellar all the time when I was in my late teens, early 20s living, growing up in New York. And back then it wasn’t like it is now. It was like the one venue and it was empty on Tuesdays and Wednesdays so you could get in with a coupon and the promise of buying two sodas. So for a kid, if you’re 19 or 20, it was amazing. I used to see people work out their material and Louis C.K. was definitely somebody I saw work out a lot. Do you know that bit, where his kid just keeps saying “why?”

Yeah, where he ends up questioning the nature of the universe or whatever.
Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. I remember being 19 or 20 and thinking it was boring and I think about it now and I’m like, “It’s brilliant.” It just makes you feel so stupid because you can’t answer their questions. Especially something as simple as “why.” I still think that there’s stuff to learn from comics like that and I certainly have thought about Louis C.K. in particular in terms of how he was able to talk about something that people have talked about forever. That is not new. But he still found a way to make it uniquely his.

The special is called “Vacation Baby,” which is sort of in reaction to or as a lighthearted spin on “pandemic baby.” The earliest months were during the pandemic and I guess when you have little, little ones, you’re sort of in lockdown anyway. Do you have a sense of how different your experience was because of the pandemic? Did you feel more isolated or was it just like, “this is sort of what it’s like anyway?”
I definitely think my partner felt it more than I did. Imagine you have this incredible life moment and you can’t be around your friends or family and you can’t celebrate how incredible this is. Or even doctor’s visits that should be like,” I can’t wait to see how my child has progressed.” Instead it’s “I hope my kid doesn’t get sick while I’m on the train. I hope my kid doesn’t get sick when I’m in the car. I hope my kid doesn’t get sick while I’m in the hospital doing these tests.”

We forget how scary that moment was, especially pre-vaccine or even if there was a vaccine, but they couldn’t get the vaccine, and how vulnerable they are.
And even if you could get the vaccine, was it safe for pregnant women to have the vaccine? There was just so much. We really had no idea. And so it’s like we’re afraid for our own health, the health of our parents to begin with. And now there’s this child. I’ve heard horror stories after the fact, which I’m glad I didn’t hear before because it would’ve been the worst. I had a friend so careful around Covid. Didn’t see anybody, never went out, got Covid while giving birth.

Oh my god.
That’s the horror story. It’s also one of the reasons we moved to San Diego to have the kid, because that’s where my partner’s family’s from and San Diego, they weren’t wearing masks but they also weren’t on top of each other.

I actually went UC San Diego, having grown up on the West Coast. It’s a surprisingly conservative area.
There’s a whole segment of “Vacation Baby” dedicated to my feelings towards San Diego.

I don’t love San Diego. I’m going to be honest.
Then you’re going to love this, I promise you. I was doing shows in San Diego in December and I felt like such a phony because the special hadn’t come out yet. So I’m pretending everything’s fine. Meanwhile, I’m like, “You people is all going to hate me when this special comes out.” But it’s a weird thing because I’m obviously grateful that my kid was born healthy and the hospital was incredible. The treatment we got was incredible but at the same time, San Diego, I mean, come on.

Yeah, it’s gross.
My kid was born in San Diego. You don’t think that hurts me every single day? You don’t think I think about that and I just wince?

How has parenthood changed your relationship with your own parents? You’ve talked about them before.
Makes me not want to blame them so much for things. We all have that, “I’m this way because you did that,” and now having a kid I’m like, “Oh man, I’m sorry. You were figuring this out when I was figuring this out. You don’t have the answers. You’re doing the best you can.” The idea of even having a teenager, I can’t even imagine since this is so difficult and I think about how was I as a teenager, how was my brother as a teenager and they had to deal with that. I’m definitely a lot more grateful. I have a perspective I did not have before. I don’t think this is all that unique, but certainly this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Having a child, raising a child.

And you’re only two years in.
I’m only two years in and it’s already, it is the most beautiful, stressful, boring and fun thing I’ve ever done. It’s everything. It forces you to really think about another human being. And especially when you’re in an artform like this, standup comedy, you literally are your business, your thoughts, your ideas. You think they’re special enough to share them with people and you assume that everybody wants to listen to what you say all the time and all of a sudden you’re with a kid who doesn’t know a lot of what you’re saying and doesn’t care and it’s about them. And to me it’s been incredibly important. It’s been a privilege being his dad. I feel so lucky to be his dad and it’s by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

What I admire a lot about you is your tone, and it’s very strong in “The Problem with a Apu,” it’s in your specials, it’s in your work with W. Kamau Bell. who’s one of your best friends. You navigate being smart, political, indignant and funny and human. It’s a tricky needle to thread. How do you think about where the line of comedy veers or risks veering into something bitter?
The audience serves as your wall. There’s walls on either side of you and they let you know when you’re bumping up against them. So it’s tricky. On one hand, bringing discomfort of any sort into a room allows for the actual magic trick that is a punchline. You’re really throwing people off, you’re making them uncomfortable and then you get yourself out of the hole you dug. And that’s still the game I love to play. You run the risk on one hand of being so angry that you’re unrelatable. You run the risk of being so righteous about a point that there’s no humor in it, you’re just preaching, which is not what I want to do. And it’s something I run the risk of more than maybe other comics because I do care about the things I’m talking about.

And they are political.
And they are. Some of the things aren’t political to me. They’re just like day-to-day things. But I understand why introducing something like that into a setting becomes political. It becomes immediately, “Oh, he’s talking about this.” So I’m aware of that, but it also means I have to make sure I give them enough laughter to justify it. They have to like me for this to work. And that’s the thing getting more personal has done. If someone says, “This is what I think about a thing,” you’re like, “Who are you?”

Yeah. Who cares?
I don’t care what you think. But if a friend says, “Here’s my thought on something,” you might disagree, but you’re willing to listen. You love your friend, you trust your friend. And that’s the thing I’ve learned more in recent years is the audience has to trust me. It cannot be seen as a given. And you trust them by getting them to laugh early. You trust them by making them feel comfortable and then you go where you’re going to go. And in this special, “Vacation Baby,” I did that as well as I’ve ever done it. Just being able to talk about the personal, be relatable, hint at the kind of comic I can be, and then by the end of it you’re seeing more aggression, you’re seeing some more, bigger points about the world, but I get the audience hopefully comfortable enough to be willing to accept it.

When I was in my early 20s I’m like, “This is what I got to say, and you’re going to hear it. If you don’t like it, leave.” And it’s not that I don’t still have a degree of that in me, but it’s a different tone. It’s much more, “I get it, I’m a parent. You had to pay for something you didn’t want to see. I’m sorry.” It’s definitely much more understanding. And I also understand the idea of “you need to like me and that is my job.” That is not pandering. It’s pandering if I’m doing material or doing things I don’t want to do and that aren’t honest to who I am. But if I’m still me.

A friend of mine, this is probably seven or eight years ago, she’s like, “It’s so funny. On stage you’re a certain way but off-stage you’re just so silly. You’re just silly.” And I thought about that long, “She’s right. I can be so absurd and bizarre and silly and voices and all these things, and I don’t include those things.” And from around 2015 on I was more deliberate, like “Let’s get silly. Let’s find moments that are just ridiculous and have funny voices and use the stage more, even though I still don’t use it enough. Let’s use everything we have.” Every joke doesn’t have to be a little essay with the punchline.

I was going to ask what the role of anger does play in comedy or your comedy.
The thing that my friend W. Kamau Bell told me once is, “You’re funniest when you’re angry.” And I don’t think I ever thought about it that way. And I look at myself, I’m like, “There’s something about how animated I get and the rage that almost comes off as curmudgeonly or a little over the top silly.”

Well impotent rage is funny, always.
No, it is. Like, “There’s nothing I can do about it!” [Jim] Gaffigan, he’s talking about different subjects but there’s still anger and frustration even if it’s a day-to-day thing. And the same is true with this. The stuff might be more loaded, but you’re still showing, “This is how I feel. I’m frustrated and there’s nothing I can do on stage right now about it other than talk about it.” So I do think that anger, if used well, is a tool, comedically. It also depends on who you are by the way, because that’s something Kamau has talked to me about too, which is very true. He’s like “When you get angry, people find it really amusing or interesting to see an Indian guy angry about a thing.” He’s like, “I’m a large Black guy. If I get angry the crowd leaves.”

That’s interesting.
It’s a completely different way of being read. So I have this strange advantage of being an in-between race and a bit of a novelty when I talk about certain things. So no one’s afraid of me when I’m yelling. That’s useful. They might still not like it, but they’re not going to be afraid. I still have some room to work.

That phrase that you just said, “in-between race,” kind of leapt out at me. What a weird way to characterize yourself.
It’s a term I’ve been using in the new material a bit more just because I’ve been thinking about, it’s not how I would necessarily see myself, but it’s how I know I’m seen because I’m not Black or white. Even if you’re Latino, there’s a census question of whether you’re a white Hispanic or a non-White Hispanic. Black or white is how we break this thing down. I’ve said it in my act, it’s like being someone thrown into a middle of a fight where you’re just learning about what happened and who the two sides are. But you have to pick a side. It’s a really hard place and you’re always like, “Am I being too white? Am I being too Black? Do I have the right to say these things? Do I have the right to not say anything?”

There’s a lot of the politics of not being one or the other. Our history is tied closely to colonial history in another country. Our roots here, there were some built in the eighteen- and nineteen-hundreds, but for the most part they came after the immigration laws changed, post-Civil Rights Act. So we’re talking late ‘60s, early ’70s. My dad came in ’77 or ’78. So it’s just a completely different history. That’s something that is useful in that people don’t know where I’m going to go. They don’t have as many images, which was frustrating before because in the images they had were the stereotypical ones that made it harder.

They were Apu, yeah.
It’s easier to throw people off and surprise people, which obviously in comedy is really good. It does mean though, it almost feels like depending on where I’m at, if it’s with an audience that really doesn’t know my work, there’s still a little bit of, “Yeah, it’s an Indian dude on stage. Okay, we got it.” There’s times I’ve been on stage where I’m like, “This is the first time I’ve been in this city. There’s eight people out of this 200 that know who I am. This is like 2005 all over again.” It does feel like it sometimes.

Does that galvanize you or does that make you feel like Oedip— like Sisyphus?
[Laughs] It makes me feel like Oedipus. At another time again, in my early 20s I would’ve absolutely hated it and been furious and I definitely didn’t handle failure as well. When I was in my early 20s, I didn’t deal with heckling well at all. I would just fly off the handle. Now with enough shows under my belt, and not that each show isn’t something I care about, but it doesn’t have the same weight it used to have. Things go great, they’re still the next show. Things go terribly, there’re still the next show. I see each one as a learning experience.

So even if I did a show in Tulsa, they were really polite, they clapped, but in terms of laughs per minute, it was a lot lower than my average. I was definitely seeing people smiling politely or nodding and it still taught me something. I still learned. I got them back a few times when I made it more local. I tried to find ways to relate to them and then go back to where I wanted to go. And it was a fight the whole way and the show was not my favorite show, but at the same time I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I went to a new place. I’m glad I still found ways to break through from time to time and that’s part of the skillset.

I relate to that in my own work. Obviously you want every article, every issue, every podcast to be good but they’re not all going to be excellent. So hopefully your batting average is high. I asked about anger. I was going to ask about honesty. It’s hard to be honest. There’s a line in the Apu doc where you say getting an honest story into the mainstream is difficult. Can you unpack that a little bit?
When it’s personal it’s hard because you’re making yourself vulnerable. Nobody can own truth, but you can own your opinion, you can own your experiences, you can own your mistakes. But especially now, that level of criticism for opening up is … can you take it? I wonder if some of these incredible writers the last 200 years before the internet, how would they have taken the criticism? Would they have been able to continue to grow and write even more honest work if they were afraid of such consequences? And not to say that it’s a bad thing for there to be consequences and not to say that criticism is always a terrible thing. It makes the job of being honest even scarier. People who are willing to be honest, you have to give them points because that is not an easy thing to do.

I’m being more honest in terms of parts of who I am, but there’s still some degree of omission. There’s things I’m uncomfortable talking about. There’s things that I don’t want to put out there. There’s parts of me that I feel like, not that I’m lying to the audience, but you don’t really know who I am because I’m not telling you this important thing. There are degrees of that and every time I chip away a little bit and am willing to share that, I feel like I’ve become a better performer for it because it’s made myself even more vulnerable and even more able to connect to the human experience. My favorite laughs are the laughs of people of color who deeply understand what I’m talking about and their laugh is cathartic. That’s always been my favorite. And there’s other laughs that are the knowing. “That’s funny, that’s smart.”

I was thinking a lot about why do I love that laugh so much? And it’s because it makes me feel seen. It makes me feel whole. It makes me feel that I wasn’t crazy. And the fact that they’re feeling the same thing is wonderful. And I’ve thought a lot about, well I talk about that in terms of race, but that could be so many other things. That could be mental health, that could be body issues, that could be a million other things that I really haven’t gotten into.

What is an area that you are uncomfortable about getting into in a way that makes you think maybe you should?
Mental health certainly. I’ve put my toe in the water over the last few years. I had a mental health chunk I was doing for a bit and then I held off for a bit because I do want to create something bigger with it. I don’t want it to just be a series of jokes. I want it to be something that’s a lot more critical. And I also think about family and my family’s experiences to some degree are off limits because part of me is like, “Well, those [stories] are not mine, they’re theirs. How much am I allowed to give?” But I do think there is something also to talk with the importance of thinking about mental health in immigrant communities, especially of a previous generation. I know a lot of people have been talking about it more than ever in standup, which is great, but [mental health] is still this area that has so much room and people’s experiences are so complicated and multi-layered. That is a place I want to sink my teeth into. I have some stuff that is really good but the stuff I’ve written, it’s good but it’s like a step short of real honesty. I’m not digging into the actual problems.

To your actual problems?
No. I’m talking about therapy. I’m talking about mental health being important. I’m talking about self-care, but it’s closer to the goal. I know why I wrote those first. It felt safe. It felt like I was pushing it just enough. And now the next step is to really dig deeper into what is a panic attack and what have they looked like and how did I deal with this era of my life? That’s the part I want to get to before I reintroduce that material because you’re already vulnerable enough being a standup comic. You’re alone on a stage. You’re like an animal in a cage with only jokes to defend yourself. Everyone’s facing you man. You’re literally by yourself with just a microphone.

It’s an absurd thing to do and that’s part of why a joke failing is so scary because laughter was your shield and all of a sudden you’ve been exposed. It’s such a terrifying thing. So you’re already really vulnerable and then you’re deciding to go talk about a subject that is not guaranteed to get big laughs, is very personal and you’re worried of others judging you or mocking you or making fun of you and you become a kid. I’m again the 12-year-old that’s afraid of the big kids. I’m exactly who I am again, just absolutely terrified, which probably means I should be talking about it. That means that’s where the real meat is.

I don’t know how long you lived in Jackson Heights, but growing up there, what was that like? And do you go back? I’ve been in Brooklyn for 20 years and I’ve certainly seen changes, but Jackson Height seems to maintain its own thing to a degree.
I lived there until I was like 9. My early memories were there. And then really the bulk of my childhood memories, like the ones that shaped me the most were when I moved to Floral Park Queens, which actually has become a suburban version of Jackson Heights. Lots of South Asians, Indian stores and restaurants. I’ve always had that experience of being around lots of South Asians and lots of people of a variety of communities. I was never the only one of a thing, which, when I went to college in Maine, really screwed with my head. When you go to Maine, all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, this is why TV shows and films look the way they do. This is why it doesn’t reflect my reality at all.”

Jackson Heights is a place I romanticize the way other people from the diaspora fantasize the homeland of their parents, the way they fantasize India for example. I have this dreamlike view of Jackson Heights and every time I go it doesn’t really disappoint me. I went to P.S. 69 for a few years and sometimes if I’m in Jackson Heights on a weekday around 3 o’clock, seeing parents from many different parts of the world line up for the exact same reason, waiting for their kids to come out and then seeing children whose parents are from everywhere run into the arms of their parent, it’s beautiful. It’s almost cheesy if it wasn’t real.

You know when you see a sunset and it’s the most incredible thing in the world. And at the same time if you saw it on a postcard, you’re like, “This is really cliched and hacky.” But when you’re seeing it in person, you’re like, “This is the most beautiful thing and I can’t believe I would ever see this as cliched and hacky.” It’s like that. There are these kinds of genuine moments of wonder and excitement and of “is this what the future will look like?” that still excite me. You walk around Jackson Heights, you go to Little India, which is really little South Asia because there’s food now from everywhere and people from everywhere and stores from everywhere. You’ll see Sikhs and you’ll see Muslims and people are spitting pone on the floor like they really are home.
You walk eight blocks and you’re in the Columbian section, you walk a few more and you’re in little Thailand. To me you have the urban setting of trains and buses mixed with apartment buildings and houses, mixed with backyards, but the dirtiness of urban living with diversity. It’s this incredible mix of New York, of everything I love about New York. The only thing that lacks is greenery.

Your mom sounds like an incredibly remarkable person. She was a doctor with her own practice in India before she moved here to marry your dad. I don’t know what the question is there other than just I want to shout out your mom.
It’s so cool to hearing her on Death, Sex and Money or different podcasts. Just the idea of my mom has done podcasts already is kind of wild. And podcasts where I wasn’t invited but she was is also really funny to me. And she has a lovely friendship with Anna Sale, which I know means a lot to both of them, which is wonderful. Mom is somebody who has a story that’s both unique but similar to a lot of other immigrant women. She was not married, had her own practice as a doctor in southern India in her late 20s during the ‘70s when it really was somewhat unheard of. You just didn’t see this, especially in a more conservative part of the country, and getting married, moving to America, starting over, having kids, becoming a housewife and then reentering the workplace. That’s a very complex life. That’s three or four different lives and trajectories. And to be able to adjust to deal with the great disappointments and make the best of it, that’s where so much of my sense of humor comes from.

She seems hilarious.
That’s how she survived. That’s how we all kind of get through it. Humor has some evolutionary benefit because why else is it around? What else does it do? It doesn’t make you run faster, it doesn’t make you fight. It doesn’t help you get food necessarily, but it keeps you going when things feel hopeless. And my mom taught me that more than anybody and it’s just really nice to know that other people that don’t actually know her, appreciate her. That feels really good to me.

It’s interesting that you say all that about humor because you didn’t initially plan to get into standup in the first place. Did you? You have a master’s in human rights from London School of Economics. You wanted to be an immigrant rights organizer. How did this happen?
I stumbled into something I love. I’ve always loved standup, but it never seemed realistic. There was no evidence based on TV and film that I would be a professional standup comic or even have a chance. And we’re talking about early 2000s. So by the time I went to Seattle, I was working for Pramila Jayapal at a nonprofit she started. Pramila now is a congresswoman out of Seattle and she was my mentor at the time. And I was doing this incredible work, working with immigrants and refugees and victims of hate crimes. And it was just really the work I wanted to do, especially in those years after 9/11. And there’s a great standup scene in Seattle and I’d been doing standup in high school and college, and this was the first time I was doing it every night. This was a real professional scene and I was going all in, but it was for fun. I never saw it as something that would lead to anything else. And the next thing I know I got discovered by the HBO Comedy Festival. This was back in the days where a comedy festival alone could make a career potentially. Now the internet does that for you. So I made that. I got booked to be on Jimmy Kimmel Live. I got a manager. This is all within a few months.

Oh, wow.
I planned to go to the London School of Economics and I ended up getting my acceptance to this human rights masters program all at the same time basically. Even though I had done these things and all of a sudden I had the infrastructure of a comedy career, I didn’t trust it. There was no reason to trust it. Part of me was like, “Okay, this is a novelty and that’s cool, but I want to get my degree because I don’t know where this is going and if I still want to do this after, then at least I know I got my degree.” So that’s what I did.

Nothing more lucrative than a career in human rights.
I found that the only thing that’s less lucrative, standup comedy.

You are also on a Netflix show, “Snack Versus Chef” with Megan Stalter as your co-host. She’s hilarious. First, do you have a favorite snack?
Ah man, I love Reese’s Pieces very much, to the point where I find the peanut butter M&M insulting. It just feels like they got into the game late to compete with Reese’s Pieces and it’s just very unsatisfying.

I know exactly what you’re saying, but there’s nothing wrong with a peanut M&M.
No, no. That’s a different thing altogether, but what is this peanut butter business? This isn’t your lane. I just didn’t like the idea that they were encroaching on a territory that really was unique to Reese’s Pieces. If you ever wonder why I was asked to host a show that really had no political or social message, it’s because I’m able to do that too.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.