OK so there was no fireplace, and it wasn’t exactly just a chat either. A short while ago I got to speak with comedian Hari Kondabolu on a number of things before his shows at Helium Comedy Club this weekend in Philadelphia. If the name’s familiar you’ve probably seen his stand up on Comedy Central or John Oliver’s New York Stand-up Show, heard his tracks from Waiting for 2042, or his KondaBulletins on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell on FX. He also had a killer set on Conan last year.

On a personal note it’s a really cool thing for me to see someone like me do well in comedy and the media in general – there’s not a lot of folks you see that are the product of immigrant Indian parents living in the United States attacking a medium like comedy, and killing it with concussive force and pinpoint accuracy at the same time. You see for kids like me we had our stereotypical parental pushes towards being doctors or engineers. Naturally our parents wanted the best for us and that’s what life was, but there were near zero examples of anyone like us really doing anything different, and part of it was just us not knowing better.

(Full disclosure, I went the engineering route.)

On growing up Indian in the US, Hari had a lot of familiar things to say: “Being any kind of outsider shapes your worldview. You realize your restrictions and what restrictions are placed on you. It tells you what you’re allowed to be and what you’re not allowed to be. You don’t see other images of yourself on television and in media, things that you and your friends are enjoying. And even in Queens and Jackson Heights, I grew up around so many south Asians, surrounded by diversity. I didn’t even use the word diversity. I mean it’s not even a word I used until college. Then I see the outside world through media and was like ‘Oh… where I am isn’t the rest of the world because we don’t exist outside reality.’ Which is weird, right? Because the reality I see isn’t the same reality the rest of America sees.”

And those restrictions Hari mentions are the same ones kids like me grew up with. We had Apu on The Simpsons or minor characters or the stereotypical comic relief. And it wasn’t until seeing Margaret Cho’s stand-up for the first time that it changed for him. Cho, a first generation child of Asian immigrants talking about her experiences and making people laugh was something he immediately connected with, and made him feel like he could use stand up to share his own experiences to make people laugh, even though he wasn’t White, Black or Latino. He went on, “So the idea that I couldn’t do anything in this field initially was there because there was no proof I could. There were no examples, no heroes. And Margaret Cho made me feel like there was at least some possibility.” And that spark and inspiration opened up a lot of things.

From his perspective in a minority position (and the empathy he “caught” from his mother) Hari has been able to see unfairness and injustice, and through his love of comedy was able to express and share his frustrations. “Post 9/11 I became a politicized person. I saw justice as something essential we had to strive for. Everything changed for me, I ‘m a different person and had to share something honest. Seeing Paul Mooney perform in 2003, being a person of color, an older black comic sharing truth in such a direct and powerful way that would make white people uncomfortable, I learned that you’re allowed to make people uncomfortable and be funny. And there’s a thrill in that, and there’s a joy the audience gets and a catharsis that the audience gets when I can take people to an edge and make them laugh. You can feel the different types of laughter – you know the laughter when someone says ‘I get why that’s funny’ and you get the laughs that say ‘I know that experience.’ And you want to hit on both levels.”

Getting people to laugh on his terms is his goal, albeit a hard one, and he does it well. “Seeing my heroes do things like that or express their pain and express their frustration through comedy, that’s hugely influential.”

Taking people to that edge though isn’t without its consequences. He’s had people walk out of shows, heckle, disrupt and say racist things online, many times asking why all of his material is about race. But that’s not always true – taking a look at his album Waiting for 2042 (which is the year the American white population will statistically dip below 50%) there’s a ton of material that has nothing to do with race. Tracks like “Weezer Broke My Heart” and “My Healthcare Plan” have nothing to do with race, but still deliver masterfully crafted jokes about politics and music with the same tone and edge as his race related jokes.

“First I enumerate the things I’m trying to say – it’s longform and I hide punchlines, and these are the things I think get lost sometimes because people are so fixated on other parts of it.” He went on to say “When you hear anything about race, there are people that are so obsessed with race, the vast majority being white people because we’re in America and that’s how this works, you say anything about race and it’s all the same. They don’t see any nuance in it. It’s all ‘race race race’ instead of ‘immigration, colonialism, what my parents went through, these are all the experiences of my life that are shaped by that construct. People avoid details because details are scary.”

Coming from a similar background, every joke he tells speaks to a place that I come from, but even for those who don’t share that history, his craft can’t be overlooked. The way that he delivers his punchlines may hit you multiple times once the layers of the material kicks in. It’s not just comedy for brown people. It’s not just for minorities. It’s for everyone, and can be appreciated on a number of different levels. He puts it best:

“I think the thing is that I’ve seen enough art that there’s not enough skill in it. So my goal is to make sure you can’t discredit who I am or what I’m saying because I’m going to write the best stuff possible in the most unique way possible. I don’t just want to say the things, I want to find new ways to say it, I want to say things you haven’t actually heard even though you say you have because you’re too afraid to delve deeper into it. And I’m going to get that to you somehow.”

Make sure to check the links above to see some of his brilliant sets. You can check out Hari’s shows this weekend at Helium Comedy Club in Philadelphia, and pick up tickets for the show here.