Yesterday Hari Kondabolu had a 49-minute interview on Greater Philadephia’s WHYY-FM Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane. The New York comedian is in Philadelphia for three nights, and he performed at the Helium Comedy Club last night, with additional shows tonight and Saturday. For ticket information visit his website.
In this latest radio interview, Kondabolu discussed his life, his album, Queens (NY), his Jindal-related hashtag, Hinduism and a whole lot more. The snippets below are a small sample of Kondabolu’s comments. For more, listen to the complete interview online. The audio is embedded at the end of this post.
On humor: “Humor is a coping mechanism. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s a way to survive.”
On politics: “There’s no accountability for Donald Trump.” “I hate Bobby Jindal…He’s against everything I believe in…”
On Twitter: “You tweet something, it could be news.”
On how some comedians are wary of playing for college students: “If they’re not laughing at these things, we have to figure out how to make them laugh because that’s our job as comedians.”
On his craft: “I write my jokes like essays, and I look for punchlines to prove my point.”
On Queens: “I’ve grown up in Queens, New York, one of the most diverse places in the world. Whenever people talk about the future, they’re basically talking about it turning into Queens.”
On whether he would still do the character Manoj he portrayed in a short film, a comic who got cheap laughs for jokes about his culture: “You can’t control exactly why people laugh, but when you can, shouldn’t you? For me, I don’t want to do that.”
On Hinduism: “Hinduism is so not formal. You do it depending on where you’re from or which part of the world and local traditions. So I do it the way I do it.”
