Hari Kondabolu’s Netflix Special Shows He’s The American Master of Irony

A lot of people want to call Hari Kondabolu a “political” comedian. His recent documentary, The Problem with Apu, sparked a much-needed conversation about the hurt The Simpsons has caused an entire culture. He’s built a reputation for sharp, progressive punchlines, and his new Netflix special, Hari Kondabolu: Warn Your Relatives, tackles racism, identity politics, and his mother’s penchant for setting up interracial gay couples with a crusader’s brand of might.

But it’s too simplistic to label Kondabolu as merely a “political” comic when he’s actually a master at irony. His material is concerned with the topics of injustice and equality, but his jokes work because they’re steeped in irony and its snarky cousin, sarcasm. Kondabolu builds most of his jokes around the free fall that exists between how we expect things to be and how they are, and he uses structure and delivery to highlight this gap.

If you watch the first twenty minutes of Hari Kondabolu: Warn Your Relatives, you’ll notice that Kondabolu delivers his most potentially outrageous jokes in this unique tone of voice that is both seething in righteous anger, flailing frustration. Yet he also manages to deliver these most scathing punchlines in an almost flat, weirdly sarcastic cadence. He’s angry, but he’s playful. He means what he’s saying, and yet he shrugs off his rage like it’s nothing. You’re never 100% sure who he is mocking and that creates an atmosphere of relief where you can laugh.

As a comic, Kondabolu is obsessed with the irony of societal expectations. He gets gleeful when he sees tables have been turned, but he also finds fun in how people see him versus how he sees himself. He does this in terms of race, but also social stereotypes. “I know what I look like,” the 35-year-old very human comedian jokes. “I look like a muppet getting its PhD.”

He later makes a joke about how he knows from personal experience that doing homework for jocks won’t mean you get invited into their social clique. When the audience laughs at his suggestion that he wasn’t the nerd in the situation, he fires back at them in his trademark tone: “Oh, fuck you, audience! You don’t know me! I was an athlete!” There’s the slightest shudder of a beat, before he adds, still in his sort of sarcastic indignation: “Yes, chess is a sport!”

Then, as the laughter dies down, Kondabolu turns from the audience, shakes his head, and mutters with a giggle, “Did not even play chess.” The whole thing was a goof on stereotypes, and yet he uses the whole sarcastic metaphor to say something honest about how he see’s Trump and his supporters.

Kondabolu is the kind of comic who interacts with the audience. It’s not that he heckles them or calls them out. Rather, he responds to what they respond to. He’s constantly probing the distance between his experience and his audience’s, and that’s what he riffs off of. Otherwise he wouldn’t know to pause mid-set while talking about his love of mangos to point out that some in the audience probably feel like they are in an NPR special about them.

A lot of comics have jokes about their brushes with Hollywood, and Kondabolu does, too. But instead of poking fun at the trappings of celebrity itself, like in John Mulaney’s musings on Mick Jagger’s rock star lifestyle or Aziz Ansari’s riff on how 50 Cent doesn’t know what a grapefruit is, Kondabolu’s bit is once more about the irony of expectations: his own and those of the people around him.

It turns out that Kondabolu was cast in a heavy drama opposite Academy Award nominee David Oyelowo. The irony that he was hired for this project is funny enough to Kondabolu, but he reveals that when he struggled to find his footing in a serious scene about grief, he was gobsmacked by Oyelowo’s commitment to the scene. The comic recalls his own inner monologue watching him act: “Oh, shit he’s pretending this is real or something!” As if that’s not what acting is supposed to be. The whole bit is just layer upon layer of reality twisting in on itself: somersaults of irony.

Kondabolu isn’t ignorant to his obsession with irony. In one bit, he makes a Swiftian argument for eating the rich and taking their organs. Just as you think he might be going far, he keels back, and then calls out Jonathan Swift and “A Modest Proposal” by name. Kondabolu understands what Swift did: that the disconnect that defines something as irony is what allows people to use it to connect with new kinds of empathy and understanding. The reversal of expectations allows you to scrutinize what might be wrong with your preconceptions in the first place. It is a nimble way to point out flaws in the system, and Kondabolu has a lot of flaws he wants to point out.  

Stream Hari Kondabolu: Warn Your Relatives on Netflix