Brown in the USA: Representations of South Asians in American Comedy

Aditya Hans Prasad Writing 3, Section 5 Professor Douglas Moody March 2018. Brown in the USA: Representations of South Asians in American Comedy The second largest immigrant group in the United States of America, South Asians continue to emigrate in larger numbers than ever. This swell in immigration, and the resulting vast American Indian diaspora have had a deep sociocultural impact on America. However, this impact is solely characterized in popular media by the one-dimensional, inaccurate Indian stereotype- thick accents, nerds, convenience store owners, the IT guy. Traditionally, comedy has propagated these stereotypes, making Indians the targets of their jokes. Television shows like The Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons portray characters that embody these stereotypes. Even comedians of Indian origin such as Russel Peters perform jokes at the expense of their own race. In fact, this stereotyping has been extremely detrimental to the Indian diaspora and its culture. However, the recent generation of American comedy has recognized the harmful absurdity of this formulaic image of Indians and addresses issues of race in order to deconstruct these conventional patterns. The traction that this counter stereotyping movement has gained is testament to the great cultural power that comedy wields. Since comedy in its most fundamental form is the art of creating something which is ‘funny’, one can easily visualize it as an economy of jokes and laughs between the comic and the audience. The comic creates the joke, and the audience’s response determines whether the joke was a good one. How the audience reacts also influences the comic’s humour and style, which in turn reinforces the audience’s own views and beliefs. Since its inception as a formal sector in entertainment, humour has been used as a medium to reflect the collective thought process of a society. If an audience is uncomfortable laughing at a joke, it is highly possible that it the subject of that joke is unacceptable comedic material in its culture. Similarly, if an audience laughs at a stale joke without thinking it through, it is equally likely that the topic is completely normalized in its culture. By analyzing the comedy of a society—what jokes it produces, and what jokes it laughs at, one can gain some deep insights into the issues that it faces. This is especially true with respect to topics such as race, religion, sexuality, and gender. However, the comic ultimately leads a conversation, and therefore has an important role. As Krefting puts it, “Jokesters unmask inequality by identifying the legal arrangements and cultural attitudes and beliefs contributing to their subordinated status—joking about it, challenging that which has become normalized and compulsory, and offering new solutions and strategies “(Krefting 2). In a certain sense, comedians are the intellectuals and thinkers in our modern media obsessed society, and their jokes are meant to push the boundaries they are created within. As a result, they have a serious responsibility to the society they serve to entertain. The cultural weight of comedy is therefore no laughing matter. Unfortunately, a large portion of material society considers to be humourous is not wit that challenges an issue, but regurgitated jokes at the expense of one or many targeted communities. There are many popular, successful comedians who have acts that centre around their race—Dave Chapelle, Gabriel ‘Fluffy’ Iglesias, Chris Rock. The first comic of South Asian heritage to make it big in the industry, Russel Peters rose to prominence with routines based mainly on thick Indian accents, arranged marriages, and other Indian stereotypes. His main act involves him going on long tirades about Indian parents, Indian food, Indian names, essentially anything that strikes him as different about Indian culture. Instead of celebrating or accepting these cultural differences, Peters crudely mocks them -- "Some Indian names are good, cool, but you've got to think, when you come here to America, that they won't sound so good. I knew a Sukhdeep and a Hardik. Who the hell names their kid Hardik?" (Tsering). He speaks with a caricaturized Indian accent and portrays Indian characters as overly generalized, unnaturally dull, loud, and conservative, quite unlike actual Indian people. Much of Russel’s audience is South Asian, a fact which acknowledges in quite a damning fashion. "And look at you brown bastards! There are a lot of closed motels in town tonight” (Tsering). Nevertheless, South-Asian audiences flock to watch him as until fairly recently, he was the only comedian to address the huge minority group. His jokes may sometimes be funny, but they inevitably serve to alienate Indian culture from the cultures around it. In fact, Peters has expressed his views on how he views Indian culture quite explicitly, saying "I'm not a big fan of people saying, 'Come on, let's go out and be brown.' I'm all, okay, be brown, be as Indian as you wanna be. But understand that you are not in India any more. And if it's that great, go back" (Tsering). It is this underlying bias in his humour that has led to many viewing him as a comedian who exploits race, rather than celebrating it. It is certainly true that a fair portion of Peters work focuses on other immigrant groups including Chinese, Jamaican, and Arabs, but even these acts are laden with thick accents and blatant stereotyping. Discussing Peters act, Faiza Hirji writes, “As a Canadian of South Asian ancestry, I myself am amused by his jokes about Indian tendencies regarding matchmaking, strict parenting, and prejudices toward other ethnic groups. At the same time, I am sometimes aware of discomfort, of uncertainty as to whether there is really a difference between a comic routine and bigotry. When Peters adopts a strong Chinese accent to mimic a Chinese shopkeeper or martial arts expert, I am reminded of times when I have heard other individuals use such accents to mock Chinese Canadians and have felt, with utter conviction, that I was witnessing racist acts. How does one define the difference? “(Hirji). It is evident that an unavoidable consequence of race-targeting humour like Peters’ is a great blow to one’s racial identity, even to a supporter of Peters like Hirji, who later goes on to support him and justify his words. Despite her ultimate support of Peters work, Hirji’s own words are ideal to describe the negative effect that the comedic style of Peters has on cultural identity— “When audience members laugh at humour derived from a racialized parody, they validate any stereotypes embedded within” (Hirji). Peters’ humour provides constant validation to stereotypes about Indians, usually in an incredibly tasteless and crude fashion. However, Russel Peters is only one player in the overarching problem of South Asian misrepresentation in comedy and popular media. American television has been distorting the Indian image for years. Brown characters are rare on-screen, and if present are stereotypes designed to be fodder for clichéd ‘Indian’ jokes. Television shows such as Seinfeld, Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, and Phineas and Ferb are all guilty of creating such formulaic brown characters. These characters seldom have any traits that run deeper than those that the brown stereotype attributes them. They have uncommonly long convoluted names, which are often made up, such as The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon or The Big Bang Theory’s Rajesh Ramayan Koothrappali. They are taxi drivers, convenience store owners, IT service workers or high achieving science geniuses. They are all meek and powerless characters. More disturbingly, these roles are often portrayed by white actors in brownface. In an interview with NPR, Hari Kondabolu, a popular comedian of Indian origin, takes on the famous Indian convenience store owner in the Simpsons’, “Apu, a cartoon character voiced by Hank Azaria, a white guy. A white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father” (Kondabolu). Kondabolu goes on to highlight why he thinks such a characterization is dangerous to the identities of individuals of South Asian heritage: I think something can be funny and it's not necessarily right. Like, I find Apu funny. He's a really funny character. But he's based on this faulty foundation of, like, a caricature. So, you know, fundamentally everything that he's going to do is based on a caricature. And that's weird. Like, this whole character is what white writers thought of us 30 years ago, thought of our community. This isn't how we represent ourselves. This is how they view us. And that's a hell of a thing. And I remember watching "The Simpsons" as a kid. And I still love "The Simpsons." And I would always be taken out of the show a little bit when Apu would come on or there would be another racist stereotype 'cause it'd be like, oh, this wasn't for us. This was meant for someone else. (Kondabolu) Apu has been the poster boy for the Indian accent since his introduction to The Simpsons. Due to its constant reinforcement, this Apu accent is now expected from every brown character in all forms of popular media. Kal Penn, a famous actor of Indian origin, documented this expectation on Twitter, with a post that pictured a script he had auditioned to play an Indian character for, and the reaction his audition got— “Jeez I remember this one! They were awful. ‘Can you make his accent a little more AUTHENTIC?’ That usually meant they wanted Apu” (Penn). Shilpa Dave has termed this ‘brown-voicing’, identifying the “specific racializing trait among South Asian Americans in Hollywood productions, which simultaneously connotes both foreignness and familiarity because the accent is identified with an English-speaking identity and hence offers some cultural privileges of assimilating into American culture” (Dave 41).

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