A short film written by comic Hari Kondabolu will be playing with a group of other shorts at the SFIAAFF film festival this weekend (Friday night and Sunday night), and readers in the Bay area might want to check it out. As you may remember, Sepia Mutiny posted on Hari’s aggressive brand of comedy earlier, in this post (also see Smithsonian Diamonds Exhibit — with a rather shocking epithet for the Queen of England).
Here is the short blurb on Manoj: 
MANOJ is a short documentary about the life and remarkable success of Indian-born standup comedian, Manoj Krishnamurthy. Manoj’s use of South Asian stereotypes has led to a growing fan base across the United States and has placed him on the edge of greater stardom. However, this begs the following questions: What happens in America when you’ll do whatever it takes for a laugh? What if you don’t care?
The idea of the film is interesting — what if a performer actively and intentionally set out to exploit comic Indian stereotypes for all they’re worth? It reminds me, a bit, of Dave Chappelle’s own dilemma about whether his brand of comedy was subverting old racial humor, or in some sense perpetuating it. It’s also an issue that is in the air when discussing Kal Penn or Russell Peters.
No clips from the film are available online yet, but Hari was nice enough to email me a couple of snips of dialogue to give us a sense of what he’s after in Manoj:
INT. COMEDY UNDERGROUND STAGE- NIGHT
MANOJ KRISHNAMURTHY, an Indian comedian in his mid-30s is performing on stage at the Comedy Underground in Seattle. He is wearing a blue Kurta shirt, and has a beard.
MANOJ: Hello, my name is Manoj, I just flew in from India and boy, are my 8 arms tired!
Manoj waves hands as if he is flying.
Audience laughs.
MANOJ: Thank you. Thank you.
And then from later in the film:
MANOJ: I had a tough time meeting women in India. They just didn’t understand, you know, what I was about and I think part of it was my approach, you know. I used to go up to the ladies and I used to be like, “yeah, so… YOUR FATHER OWES MY FATHER LAND! NOW YOU MUST MARRY ME!”
Audience laughs.
MANOJ: And that wouldn’t work. Uh, you know, I’m a man of a different era, I guess.
It’s realistic that an audience would find these types of jokes quite funny; it’s even fairly realistic to presume that an Indian-American comedian could actually become a star working self-deprecating Indian material. Audiences would likely eat it up, thinking, “it’s ok to laugh at that, because he’s Indian.”
But how would such a performer live with himself? And what does it tell us about the acceptability of racism as a norm?
