‘The Problem With Apu’ Wonders How to Rehabilitate the Embarrassing ‘Simpsons’ Character

In The Problem With Apu — a 50-minute documentary that TruTV will premiere Sunday night — the comedian Hari Kondabolu scrutinizes The Simpsons’ most embarrassing character, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian immigrant who runs a Kwik-E-Mart in Springfield. It is unclear whether Kondabolu has set out to rehabilitate Apu, or recast him, or simply eliminate him. “The idea of killing the Indian immigrant is also upsetting,” Kondabolu concedes. So Apu’s future remains uncertain, though it’s clear that Kondabolu can live with him no longer.

Kondabolu is a second-generation Indian American, and his documentary centers Apu within a broader examination of South Asian stereotypes in U.S. television and film. The Problem With Apu summarizes the tropes, ticks, and impoverished assumptions that animate Apu, who, despite being voiced by a white guy, has become a perverse industry standard for Indian American characterization; a classic Indian American character despite not being Indian American at all. Kondabolu speaks with several actors, such as Kal Penn and Sakina Jaffrey, as well as fellow comedians, such as Aasif Mandvi, Russell Peters, and Hasan Minhaj, about their experience with these stereotypes throughout their lives and careers. They all resent “the accent,” which Jaffrey calls “patanking” — “being asked to do a broad Indian accent with broad acting … like a monkey” — most of all. In these conversations, Apu serves as a common conversation piece; his accent and his subservience form a specter that haunts these performers’ efforts to play more substantial Indian characters and tell more authentic and meaningful stories about Indian American experience instead of just signifying citizenship status and professions. Mandvi describes his early acting credits as “cabbie, cabbie, cabbie, deli, deli, deli, doctor.”

In Kondabolu’s other interviews, his fellow South Asians speak of Apu as a lost cause. Kondabolu tells Kal Penn that he loves The Simpsons despite Apu, and Penn responds with a bitter laugh: “You hate yourself.” Penn speaks as an actor who humored some demoralizing roles of his own before he first played Kumar Patel, the adorable slacker from the Harold & Kumar films. Two years before the release of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Penn fit a much different bill in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, starring alongside Ryan Reynolds as his dweeby, oversexed, exchange-student Indian American sidekick, Taj Mahal Badalandabad. Penn says he hung up on his agent the moment she first told him the character’s name. But Penn took the role, and he even got his own, reviled spinoff sequel, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj, released in 2006. Kondabolu sees Penn as an accomplished Hollywood actor who has shaken free of the worst stereotypes at this point in his career, but even so, Penn speaks bitterly, knowing that the role of Taj Mahal Badalandabad places him in lineage with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the black sheep of a family that has never claimed him despite how famously he claims them.

Of course, Kondabolu’s bogeyman Apu isn’t the first or the only lazy racial archetype that haunts American entertainment. There’s classic blackface and modern thug cosplay; there’s Mr. Yunioshi, Fu Manchu, and “The Chinese Waiter”; there’s Taj Mahal and Hrundi V. Bakshi. Thinking beyond just Apu, Kondabolu sits with Whoopi Goldberg, who collects artifacts of anti-black minstrelsy that she describes as “negrobilia.” Goldberg says she’s convinced that even the most insidious stereotypes aren’t rooted in spite, but rather ignorance. Goldberg says the only people who should feel embarrassed by such ignorance is white people. Her moral high ground may provide a retreat from humiliation, but it offers little comfort to anyone hoping for better work and better representation than Apu. The ignorance that informs The Simpsons’ characterization of Apu may be silly, but it is also pervasive, and it is quite powerful indeed.

Ideally, the stakes of Kondabolu’s documentary are higher than just the future of The Simpsons or Hank Azaria’s esteem. For Kondabolu and his viewers, The Problem With Apu is an opportunity to articulate a silly cartoon character’s substantial impact on race relations in Hollywood. But, unfortunately, Kondabolu stops short of imagining a better version of The Simpsons or a world beyond Apu.

There are few other TV series as long-lived and beloved as The Simpsons, which has aired for 29 years. The Simpsons introduced Apu in the eighth episode of the show’s 1989–90 debut season. Apu is a foundational character. He has starred in episodes, such as “The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons,” dedicated to giving the character a family life and some measure of interiority. The Simpsons features a deep cast of popular, recurring characters who, in their multitude, do not represent any real human group as singularly as Apu encapsulates Indian immigrant stereotypes: Homer’s an incompetent father, Barney’s a drunk, Sideshow Bob is a devious clown, and they’re all the same color. For better or worse, Apu is the only one of the show’s principal characters who isn’t yellow — by which I mean white.

And yet, Apu was conceived entirely by white creators, just like all the other principal characters of The Simpsons. So, Kondabolu argues, Apu embarrasses some Indian Americans without belonging to them in any real way, more so indebted to an old Peter Sellers performance than to any actual Indian Americans. Disturbed by this imbalance of influence, Kondabolu first sets out to understand what was going through the creative team’s minds when they conceived and named Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Old interviews from the creators and producers offer conflicting accounts of whether Apu was initially conceived as an Indian American store clerk, or whether the producers initially resisted such a characterization as “too cliché” until Azaria sold them on his accent. In a 2015 interview, Azaria says he in part based his voice performance on Seller’s brown-faced impression of an Indian actor in the Blake Edwards film The Party, released in 1968. “I’ve since learned that a lot of Southern Asian people, a lot of Indians, found that Peter Sellers portrayal fairly offensive,” Azaria adds, smiling.

“No shit,” Kondabolu offers in response to the clip.

In the documentary’s second half, Kondabolu becomes obsessed with the prospect of confronting Azaria in person. If “the accent” is Apu’s most humiliating quality, then, for Kondabolu, it stands to reason that Azaria, rather than series creator Matt Groening, should be the final boss in Kondabolu’s war on Apu. Repeatedly, Kondabolu suggests that his failure to interview Azaria would make his film a “waste” of time and money. Given Kondabolu’s jokiness throughout — he’s a comedian, after all — these stakes seem at least partially contrived to add more immediate and practical tension to his intellectual pursuit.

Worse yet, Kondabolu’s singular obsession with Azaria becomes a prevailing distraction from more ambitious consideration of the ideal future of The Simpsons and the cultural shifts that have rendered Apu increasingly unpalatable. Other comedians, such as Aziz Ansari and Margaret Cho, have contributed to this shift, Ansari having created his own Netflix drama, Master of None, as a retreat from less substantial supporting roles, and Cho having famously sparred with Tilda Swinton over the white British actor’s casting in Doctor Strange. As much as Kondabolu clearly resents Azaria and the series creators for not having thought very hard about the nature of Apu, Kondabolu offers no remedies of his own design. Apart from his realization that killing or otherwise erasing Apu from The Simpsons might be fraught, Kondabolu and his subjects apply little time to imagine what a more considerate version of The Simpsons, with a more authentic, sympathetic, and interesting characterization of Apu might look like — and how South Asian characters in predominantly white casts might offer more than clichés and basic ethnic tropes. That lapse of Kondabolu’s imagination is the documentary’s real waste.

After first rebuffing Kondabolu’s interview requests through his agent, Azaria eventually writes Kondabolu a useless word of encouragement via email. “The film looks really interesting and thought-provoking,” Azaria writes. “I’m glad you’re making it.” Despite his obvious hesitation to throw himself in front of Kondabolu’s critique, Azaria cannot deny that TV and film criticism have shifted on Kondabolu’s favor; his critique will likely prevail in the press. Still, Azaria declines to speak “on behalf of the whole show” for the documentary, and so Kondabolu concludes his pursuit of Azaria in a state of frustration. Azaria does sincerely raise the possibility of speaking with Kondabolu in a public forum following the documentary’s release, an offer that irritates Kondabolu on principle. “That’s great that he gets to choose how he wants to be portrayed,” Kondabolu says. “What a privilege.”