This is a busy time for comedian Hari Kondabolu. He has a new album coming out on July 22 titled 'Mainstream American Comic'. He has shows coming up at the Bell House in Brooklyn on August 3 and 4. And he's working on a documentary about Apu, the convenience store owner in The Simpsons. It's a productive time after a long and unusual journey — that began in Queens.

"I didn’t go to the schools I went to and I didn’t study as hard as I did to be a stand-up," Kondabolu said. "But I loved it and I still love it."

Hari Kondobolu's resume is unusual for a standup comedian. There was his job a decade ago as an immigrant rights organizer in Seattle.

"You’re working with refugees and immigrants and victims of hate crimes," the comedian said. "You’re doing this incredible work and you’re not gonna do it anymore cause you want to tell jokes?"

Then, the credential that's a must for all great comedians — a Master's degree from the London School of Economics.

"I didn’t do much comedy when I was in London," he said. "I planned to, and then I remembered how hard school was.

"I’m getting this degree but I kept thinking about going back on stage."

Kondabolu began his comedy career at his old high school, Townsend Harris in Flushing, where we conducted this interview.

He lives in Brooklyn now, but Kondabolu still considers himself a Queens guy.

"Queens is basically what everyone’s fearing in the rest of the country," Kondabolu said. "They worry about what’s gonna happen when everything is this diverse and there’s so many languages and it’s wonderful! You can see the world without traveling. The food is much better here."

His Queens background and vantage point as a brown man in America inform much of his comedy.

"You know when you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they never just say white," he joked. "No, they give you a math equation," he said. I'm a third German, a fourth Irish, and one sixteenth Welsh. it's like damn Steve, all these years I thought you were just white. My bad."

Kondabolu is out with his second album, Mainstream American Comic.

He titled his first 'Waiting for 2042," the year the Census Bureau calculates that whites will no longer be a majority of the American population.

"I don't know if there are people in this audience that are upset by this. but don't worry white people, you were the minority when you came to this country," he said. "Things seem to have worked out for you."

Kondabolu has built a loyal following through appearances in comedy clubs and on college campuses, as a writer and performer on the FX show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, with whom he's launched a podcast called Politically Reactive.

And he's been on Conan and Letterman.

But Kondabolu's growing influence is felt in areas that we don't always associate with standup comics.

"It’s amazing to hear people telling me that they were doing a sit-in at their college and they were hearing my jokes during that time period," he said. "During Occupy Wall Street that my jokes were played when people were feeling down."

"Saying that I'm obsessed with race and racism in America is like saying I'm obsessed with swimming when I'm drowning. It's absurd. I'm not the one who is obsessed. This country is obsessed."

"When I saw a picture during the Eric Garner protests, a young woman holding a poster board with a quote of mine on it with my name underneath, you know, that is not something I anticipated when I decided to do comedy," he said.

Kondabolu says he has been threatened during shows and after shows, received hate mail, even death threats.

His attitude toward most members of the audience has mellowed.

"When I was a little bit younger I think I was definitely more: 'Well they can go to hell, like, this is my stuff and I’m going to say it and that’s the end of it.'

"And as I’m getting older I realize; some of these people had to pay for babysitters. In addition, this is their one night out. And they came to the comedy club not knowing who they were going to see and they didn’t expect a discussion of colonialism."

Hari Kondabolu grew up in Jackson Heights, Floral Park and then Jamaica. He says his mother and father did not fit the stereotype of demanding and unyielding immigrant parents.

But they drew their lines.

"I remember watching TV and seeing comedians and telling my mom I wanted to be a comedian when I was like 6. And her reaction, I remember it clearly, was 'don’t you ever say that.'"

At Townsend Harris, thanks to teachers like Chris Hackney, Kondabolu realized his dream of hosting a comedy night. It was a life-changing moment.

"It’s like getting bitten. Like as soon as you are on stage and you feel that rush, I never got over that. Like, every time I tried to stop doing stand-up, like it was still in me like I had to go back up and it started here, like, it never went away."

At Bowdoin College in Maine in 2000, Kondabolu was told there school was planning a major effort to diversify.

"I was the surge of diversity I was told would exist when I got there," he said.

But there was nothing funny when Kondabolu was attacked near campus by three white men.

Adding to his frustration, Kondabolu's friends couldn't see the assault as he did.

"Telling friends like, I was the victim of a hate crime and then having a friend say to me: 'How do you know it was a hate crime? They didn’t actually use slurs. How do you know?'

"You know. You know why someone is chasing you down a street and corners you. You just know. And that’s something in New York I could not imagine being asked."

Kondabolu has been doing stand-up since his days at Bowdoin but only devoted himself to comedy full time after getting his Master's degree.

In the post 9/11 world, he changed his approach on stage.

"Thinking about all the hate crimes that were happening in Queens, in my own city, thinking about the mass deportations and the wars and things like that you know I’m writing jokes about parents and doing accents and not saying anything particularly clever, and my point of view is certainly shifting. So I wanted to write about that point of view."

"If I had a dime for every time someone came up to me and asked me if i ate monkey brains i could actually afford to eat monkey brains!"

Kondabolu made fun of his early work in a 2007 mock documentary called Manoj. He played a stand-up who uses Indian stereotypes to get cheap laughs.

"A lot of the jokes he does in that short film are jokes I used to do," he said. "Those were my jokes and that was my way of getting rid of them.

"You go up to the ladies and I used to be like, yeah so, your father owes my father land, now you must marry me! That didn't work."

"I assumed I had to tell jokes like that. This is what was gonna make people laugh. And the idea of challenging an audience and making them uncomfortable, I couldn’t even fathom that because, like, how could I deal with silence?"

There was a time when Kondabolu felt guilty about leaving his job as an immigrant advocate in Seattle.

But those feelings faded, as he realized he could use comedy to make people think as well as laugh.

When I find out that my album is being used in college and grad school curriculums , especially around social justice and sociology or race. You know, that’s incredible to me so I feel like even though I’m not doing the work, it’s finding a way to still do the work, my comedy is still finding a way to do the work."