The TV shows of the era didn’t “look anything like where I grew up,” he says. (And probably for the Ganesha statue gracing his Kwik-E-Mart counter.) But mostly, Apu imprinted himself on the viewer’s psyche with his accent, a clucking singsong that made “Thank you, come again!” a meme before memes existed.Īt first, it didn’t seem so nefarious to Kondabolu, who is now 35. In the hit Fox show’s sea of yellow-skinned Springfielders, Apu stood out for his brown skin. Or Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian-born convenience store clerk on “The Simpsons.” The guy who served monkey brains for dinner in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” “Kids were looking for some angle to make fun of somebody, and you don’t know much about Indian people, so what are your options?” he muses. “When it happens so regularly,” he says, “it’s like asking me, ‘Can you remember specific times you took the subway?’ ” The Brooklyn-based stand-up comedian and child of Indian immigrants can’t even recall the first time he heard the jeer hurled his way.
That phrase, made famous by “The Simpsons,” has haunted Hari Kondabolu for nearly 30 years.
