Stand-up comedian Hari Kondabolu has a new special coming out next week, and to promote it, he’s united with his old nemesis—Hank Azaria, whose The Simpsons character Apu haunted Kondabolu’s childhood.
In the promo video, Azaria delivers his lines with winking insincerity, promising that Kondabolu’s special, Vacation Baby is “honestly one of the greatest pieces of stand-up that I have ever seen in my life.”
“It’s filled with so many hilarious and poignant anecdotes about what it’s like to have a child during a global pandemic, and just the kind of thoughtful and biting social commentary that we’ve come to love,” Azaria says, before turning to face away from the camera to ask if he got his lines right.
“I pretty much had to do that, didn’t I?” Azaria asks Kondabolu in the end, prompting a laugh and an “Absolutely.”
Kondabolu wrote and starred in the 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu, which followed Kondabolu’s ultimately futile mission to get Azaria to speak with him about Apu on camera. In the doc, Kondabolu and other South Asian American comedians including Aziz Ansari, Kal Penn, and Aparna Nancherla spoke for the first time publicly about how Apu and references to the Kwik-E-Mart made their childhoods a nightmare.
For a while, The Simpsons avoided responding to the doc. Months later, when the show finally addressed the controversy, the results were less than inspiring.
Azaria ultimately offered to “step aside” from voicing the character in 2018. In 2020, three years after the doc debuted, Azaria told the New York Times that he would no longer voice the character because once he realized how the character came across, “I just didn’t want to participate in it anymore… It just didn’t feel right.”
Now, however, begins a new day. Vacation Baby debuts on YouTube on April 18, and as Azaria joked in the teaser after singing its praises, no one is looking forward to actually seeing it more than he is.
For more, listen to Hari Kondabolu on The Last Laugh podcast.
