American culture is littered with characters who were invented to thwart stereotypes but ended up advancing other stereotypes instead. Photograph by 20th Century Fox / Everett

On the continuum of racist things, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon initially seems but a minor transgression. Apu is the good-natured owner of the local convenience store on “The Simpsons,” the beloved cartoon that recently began its twenty-ninth season. In his best moments, he’s one of the few sane, hardworking people on the show. He sees the world askance, like a critic softly lampooning the casual bigotry of those around him. He represents a different kind of American Dream than the one on display throughout the rest of Springfield, the town where the series is set, and where so many seem to fail upward. It’s hard to be too mad when Apu cuts corners, too, wiping clean a hot dog that’s fallen on the floor and putting it back out for customers, for instance.



But Apu’s most distinguishing trait is his accent: theatrically thick, as though someone is luxuriating in all those exotic curled “R”s and the nasally twang. The thirty-four-year-old comedian Hari Kondabolu, who grew up in Queens, among immigrant accents from all over the world, describes Apu’s voice as “a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father.” A few years ago, Kondabolu recorded a segment for W. Kamau Bell’s nightly show, “Totally Biased,” in which he griped about Apu’s influence on South Asian representation. The riff struck a nerve, and Kondabolu went on to make “The Problem with Apu,” a short documentary that revolves around Kondabolu’s obsessive quest to confront the actor Hank Azaria, who voices Apu, and to reason with him. (Azaria, the descendant of Sephardic Jews, also grew up in Queens.) In the movie, which will air on TruTV on Sunday, Kondabolu talks to other children of immigrants who work in comedy, including Aziz Ansari, Aparna Nancherla, and Hasan Minhaj, and explores their vexed relationship with this character who once seemed to define the parameters for South Asians onscreen. In an early scene, we see Kondabolu performing at a comedy club; a heckler yells Apu’s catchphrase—“Thank you, come again”—after one of his jokes. “You’re the reason I do comedy, sir,” Kondabolu fires back. “You’re the reason I thought to myself, Nobody like us exists, except this cartoon character.”

American culture is littered with examples of characters—Uncle Tom, Charlie Chan—who were invented to thwart stereotypes only to end up advancing different, softer, no less racist stereotypes in their stead. Good intentions sometimes lay bare a kind of chummy condescension. Azaria, who has won awards for his work on “The Simpsons” (he voices a number of other characters in addition to Apu), once told an interviewer that he felt there was a sonorous quality to Apu’s voice—the uplifting singsong of his piecemeal English, if you will. It’s in the repetition of that mocking accent—hearing it over and over, being asked your opinion of it—that Kondabalu’s ire grows. Knowing, as one learns in the documentary, that Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons,” intended the character’s name as an homage to the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray and his wondrously textured “Apu Trilogy” only makes the whole thing more upsetting.

“The Problem with Apu” doubles as a film about what it means to be South Asian in the American imagination. All the other performers of South Asian descent whom Kondabolu interviews hate Apu with a passion. Several interviewees fantasize about ways that “The Simpsons” might kill off the character in a classy way. Kal Penn’s hostility is such that he doesn’t even like “The Simpsons.” (Many of the other interviewees still do, and the actor Utkarsh Ambudkar even appeared on the show once, to voice Apu’s young nephew Jay.) Penn tells a story about a time when a young, drunk South Asian man at a bar complained to him that people often called him Kumar, the character Penn played in the the “Harold and Kumar” series of stoner movies. Penn relates the conversation with a measure of pride. It’s better than being called Apu, the two men eventually agreed.



Success has brought all these performers closer to the rooms where characters like Apu are created. With that closeness comes the disappointment of realizing that you might as well be invisible to your heroes. Everyone shares stories about being asked to adopt an accent for a part. The comedian Aasif Mandvi calls the exaggerated accent part of his “heritage”—maybe not the part of heritage that’s chosen out of pride but the part you fashion to protect yourself. And, in a way, it’s the privilege of the acculturated to worry at all about any of this. When Kondabolu asks his parents about Apu, they don’t seem too bothered by it. Azaria is a very talented actor, his mother points out. They make fun of the buoyancy of Kondabolu’s hair that day—“Apu hair,” they call it, giggling at their son’s resemblance to his sworn enemy.

One of the more provocative moments comes when Kondabolu talks to Whoopi Goldberg about her collection of minstrel-era “negrobilia”—items produced during times of a more virulent, outward racism, when bugged-out eyes or thick lips stood in for the entirety of blackness. That these items were produced without the overt intent to offend shakes both Goldberg and Kondabolu. Like Apu, the objects weren’t consciously made to convey hatred or scorn; they were just the everyday representations of blackness that white people thought to produce. That this collapsing of an entire people into some exaggerated markers was achieved so effortlessly is what hurts the most. The people who did this didn’t even have to try.

Kondabolu’s style is dry and deadpan, occasionally taking on a lightly hectoring tone when he arrives at moments of dumbfounded exasperation. In his standup, those moments usually come with the punch lines. But here his rising voice perfectly captures a sense of ambivalence and self-doubt. He loves “The Simpsons” as much as he hates Apu. “Is it better to be clowned, or to clown yourself?” he wonders. Comedy has become a site of political protest nowadays, and it’s likely some will see “The Problem with Apu” as a killjoy’s manifesto, which is a possibility that Kondabolu acknowledges, and makes light of, early on. Observational comedy works when it makes an audience feel uncomfortable, or makes people see their world anew. Yet it often presumes perspectives that scan as “mainstream,” i.e., white and usually male. It’s hard to surmise a boundary-pushing rationale for Apu. Even Azaria himself admitted this a couple of years ago, in an interview he gave after Kondabolu’s original grievance went viral. As “The Problem with Apu” nears its conclusion, you begin to wonder if it’s really as simple as persuading the actor to stop doing the voice. Kondabolu dreams of kicking Azaria’s ass, but, as one of his friends points out, that clearly won’t happen. Perhaps Apu is just a symptom. What’s worse, really: a guy doing a voice, or the haunting, suffocating sound of everyone else laughing along?