Comedians W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu Talk Politics

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And it has been a rough roller coaster with public health and political crises all melded into one. Even so, our next guests believe that sometimes all you can do to stay sane is laugh. Long-time friends W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu are comedians and writers. And together, they host a podcast called “Politically Re-Active.” Here they are talking to our Hari Sreenivasan about what they call the dumpster fire that is American politics and the importance of affective change.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christian, thanks. W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu, thank you both for being with us. You have this new podcast out. You’re both stand-up comedians. You’ve done different types of comedy before. During — what is the impetus about bringing back this podcast that you used to have four years ago? But now, what you do? Do you guys like meet in, you know, a Denny’s parking lot in your parked cars and like record this sort of close to each other?

W. KAMAU BELL, CO-HOST, POLITICAL RE-ACTIVE PODCAST: Honestly, Hari, not my friend for 10 years, that’s how I’ll identify you. We — if we lived next door to each other, maybe this podcast wouldn’t exist. A lot of this podcast is about two really good friends connecting. And then when we connect, we talk about politics. And we thought we would put the podcast down forever, but with the state of the world — you pay attention to the news — there’s a lot going on. So, the fans of the podcast were like, when are you coming back? Look at what’s going on in the world, in this country. And so, really, it was the fans and then the pandemic providing the time that really brought it back.

SREENIVASAN: I want to take a look at kind of the state of politics today. And you have been commenting on this as well, but heading into the Biden administration now, it’s not like there is one tent that is the Democrat Party, that is the left, that is the progressive wing. There’s still quite a bit of consternation on what direction Joe Biden’s administration should take and how we get there.

HARI KONDABOLU, CO-HOST, POLITICALLY RE-ACTIVE PODCAST: I mean, the grandparents have to get out of the way. I mean, (INAUDIBLE). No offense to Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi and all the other folks that have been charged for way too long, but there’s another generation coming up, and they’re young and they’re hungry and they’re mobilizing. And it’s just a sad state of affairs that I feel like they have more in common with moderate Republicans than they do with a segment of their base of young people of color, women of color, members of the LGBTQ community. Like, they’re — it almost feels they’re more comfortable hanging out at cocktail parties with moderate Republicans and doing the business of Washington versus the business of the justice. And so, yes, I think there’s generation shift and I think that they’re trying to hold onto what they had and getting in the way of the future I really see happening.

SREENIVASAN: Kamau, the comeback to that is going to be, look, 72 million people voted for the other guy, that there is still a big gap between the type of America that Hari is describing and the America that we might have today.

BELL: Yes. You make a good point. Maybe we should be two separate countries. Thank you for bringing that up. I mean, I think the thing that honestly is happening in America, we are never as progressive as we think we are. We are never as good as we think we are. And if you look at the history of this country, it’s about trending in more progressive and inclusive directions. It doesn’t happen as fast as you wanted to. Sometimes two step forwards you get one step back, but we are always moving in a more progressive, inclusive, kinder direction. And so, I think, that if you look at the history of this country, which is, luckily, we’re a pretty young country, it’s not that long, you can see that’s the way it is. And even when things aren’t “popular” sometimes they are just correct. For example, marriage equality was made the law of the land before the entire country was on board with that. And a lot of the countries (INAUDIBLE) board with that doesn’t mean that marriage equality should not be the law of the land. I always say that if slavery had been a referendum that we voted on, I might not be free to sit here and talk to you two right now. So, there are things that are correct. It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily popular in the time that they’re correct.

KONDABOLU: You know, also like the idea of equality and justice and freedom, those aren’t things that you can take moderate opinions on, because eventually, like Kamau was saying, we move in the direction of progress and what was — what is progressive now ends up being seen as the status quo later. So, you know, we’re just saying, let’s get to that faster as opposed to like this piecemeal justice and freedom over several centuries that none of us can enjoy.

SREENIVASAN: Hari, you were mentioning on a recent podcast about the idea that we are always asking progressives to quickly endorse the dominant candidate, but that that’s — we got to wonder why — what’s in it for them to do that when ultimately the result is to water things down once you get into office.

KONDABOLU: Honestly, it angers me to no end because that is always the — how come Bernie Sanders didn’t support Hillary soon enough, endorse her soon enough? How come Elizabeth Warren didn’t support Joe Biden? How come Sanders didn’t support Joe Biden immediately? It is like — whether what’s in it for the progressive left? Because what’s going to end up happening is that we’re supposed to be good soldiers, right, and support the candidate of the Democratic Party and then the candidate gets elected and forgets us. I mean, John Kerry is currently the climate envoy. Like, no offense to John Kerry, but was he this big environmentalist all these years? I don’t remember. Like Al Gore, at least it’s like, OK, it’s kind of a mainstream choice. But fine, John Kerry never really made this — this wasn’t part of what he was using — you know, this wasn’t what he was saying on his pulpit, that’s what I’m saying. And so, it’s ridiculous that all these environmentalists, all these young people who are driven to save the planet and you choose someone that nobody has seen work on these issues.

BELL: Actually, I just thought of something, Hari K. Do you think that maybe Joe Biden has John Kerry and Al Gore like a speed dial in his phone and actually just hit the wrong one? Like they’re — oh, John, yes. Oh, man.

KONDABOLU: I mean, he definitely — he doesn’t have that issue with Jon Edwards, but, yes.

BELL: Yes, he probably deleted him a while ago.

SREENIVASAN: You know, so, Hari, you know, one of the critiques generally of the left is that on the left circles they’re wagons and they shoot each other. The right circles, they’re wagons, and they take all comers, right. It’s that there — it is such a broad consortium, a big tent. Our other brown brother, Hasan Minhaj, had a patriot act episode that talked about how the right essentially has — the left has the Denny’s menu, which is all things for all people, not necessarily any of them are tasty, and the right has the chipotle menu. It’s like, we got these eight things. And if you’re one of these eight things, you better show up and have a great time, if you’re not, go somewhere else, right. So, how do we reconcile this in the interest of trying to go forward as a country, and as you said, you know, don’t kowtow to the moderates or extremes on the other side?

KONDABOLU: I mean, it really is about what the party stands for. If you stand for certain values, that are, you know, are you — how much are you willing to compromise? Because, ultimately, when you compromise on values regarding justice and equal rights and human dignity, you’re sacrificing someone else’s human rights and human dignity, right? That’s where the compromise really lies. And so, you know, to me it’s like, what does this party stand for? And if you’re a party that really stands for these values, you can’t constantly moderate them. Because they’re not your rights to moderate.

BELL: I think it’s about the thing you said about like new people in positions of power. We had Cori Bush on our podcast when she was still running for her seat and now, she has won her seat and she’s a young black woman from Missouri, who was homeless, has been an activist, has got — lived a really hard life and now, she’s a Congress person who’s now in a position of power. And I think the more people like that you get in there who are actual real people, who have come from being activists and come from doing the work, to get in there to do the work, the more these conversations about how we do it change, because you’ll have a bunch of fired up people who really know what needs to be done and feel responsible to their constituents and not responsible to D.C.

KONDABOLU: I don’t understand how the Democratic Party is confused about this. What? A person of color out of nowhere, you know, through a cult of personality and talent taking power, how is that going to be possible? It’s like, have are you forgot those eight years already? Like they’re into this Clinton model of moderation and going towards the center when you had this incredible figure in Barack Obama who totally did not do that. Also, for all these claims that whenever there is a special to defund police, moderates lose in conservative counties. It’s like, that’s not why you lose. I mean, AOC talked about in “The New York times,” and I think it makes a lot of sense, you lose because you don’t know how to use social media. You lose if you don’t — you’re not doing what Obama did with his, you know, campaign, which was groundbreaking in terms of its use of the internet, you’re still doing the same old stuff you did 20 years ago. Of course, you’re going to lose. If the Republicans are beating you with technology, that’s your fault.

SREENIVASAN: OK. Listen, Barack Obama, former president of the United States, was recently talking to, I think it was Peter Hamby on a snapchat show and he is sort of Mr. Moderate. He was making comments — some of the comments that he was making about, for example, messaging. He said, listen, you know, if you want to say defund the police, you know what, you’re going to get a bunch of people who already agree with your point of view to say, rah, rah, and if you just rephrase it as reform the police, you might actually get more people on board for this idea. What’s wrong with that notion?

BELL: I’ll take that one.

KONDABOLU: Branding? This is a branding issue?

BELL: No, Hari, let me take it because I feel like this is — it’s black- on-black here for a second. I mean, I heard that. I heard Obama say that. I do agree that like Obama’s package was more progressive than his reality. I think he certainly was more moderate and also less than a moderate in some ways. But I — and I — when I heard him talk about defund the police, I think the piece that he’s missing — well, there’s two pieces he’s missing. One, after you hear the phrase, defund the police, you could google it and find out what it means and what the people who have been representing that phrase for many years say what it means. So, you could learn about it. And I think if you just get caught up in the catch-phrase, you’re no different than people who got caught up in Obama saying hope and change and didn’t learn what he meant about it. So, first of all, as the guy who knows about snazzy catchphrases, misleading people, he should pay more attention. Two, I think the other thing is like we tried to reform the police. We’ve tried lots of different ways to say, police, please stop beating us and killing us. Please do a better job in our communities. And it hasn’t worked. So, of course, black folks were very creative. We come up with new ways to say, OK, if you didn’t listen to this, now how about listening to this. If you didn’t respect the blues, here’s hip-hop. So, I think what we’re saying is like, we keep trying to say different ways to ask the police to do a better job and they haven’t listened. And reform certainly has failed around this country. Every urban environment has a new police chief every six to seven months, it seems like, where there’s always a new police chief who is coming in from the last city where they failed to come here to tell you how to do it differently. We’re way past reform. And I was really bummed out by Obama not actually realizing that reform is an idea that has already failed.

KONDABOLU: And with that, we will never have Barack Obama on our podcast.

BELL: I’m the only black community in America who has not met Barack Obama. I wonder why. And to be clear, I like Obama, I love Obama, I respect Obama, Obama did things that I still feel — and when I see him speak, of course, like a lot of people, there’s a part of me that just starts to weeps and gets shaky. So, there is a respect and a love for this man. But also, as Ijeoma Oluo said on our podcast recently, we still get to criticize these people.

SREENIVASAN: If you continue on to do this, does humor get easier, more difficult, stay the same, when the administration is slightly more in your favor than the last one?

BELL: Actually, I think it gets a little easier because maybe it’s not such desperate, like, anger, like it’s how I felt over the last four years. With the way that the Trump administration has handled the pandemic, it’s like, look, I’ve already dealing with a country that’s anti-black. I can’t do anti-black and anti-science at the same time. So, I feel like it actually — the humor becomes more plentiful when the situation is easier to get to and the situations aren’t so dire. But also, humor comes from pain. So, it’s just a different type of humor.

KONDABOLU: I mean, satire is back. It’s (INAUDIBLE). We’re able to give extreme examples of things.

SREENIVASAN: Kamau, in your work, are you in the fifth season now of United Shades of America?

BELL: Yes. We just finished our fifth season and I’m actually currently filming the sixth season because I am not afraid, apparently.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BELL (voice over): United Shades of America has always been a space for difficult conversations. This season it’s more important than ever.

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SREENIVASAN: Now, looking back over these seasons, what stuck out to you?

BELL: Everybody actually wants the thing that progressive wants, which is like in progressive, let’s just break it down. We want good schools for our kids, we want living wages, we want access to health care, affordable or free, depending upon maybe how much money is in your wallet, we want good streets, we want less people incarcerated, we want a kinder, gentler criminal justice. These are all things everybody wants. If you sit down and go, how does this affect your life? And that’s where I’ve learned the United Shades. I’ve talked to gang members on the south side of Chicago, I’ve talked to ex-coal miners in Appalachia and they all want the same things. The problem is that we get distracted by the team sport element of politics and we’ve gotten distracted by a ton of misinformation and lies. So, I think, if you can cut through the lies and misinformation and the team sport and go, what do you want? We all want the same things. It’s just about actually — if we all understood that, with we would get there a lot quicker.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. You know, Hari, you cranked out a documentary about Apu from “The Simpsons.”

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KONDABOLU: Apu, a cartoon character voiced by, Hank Azaria, white guy. A white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father.

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SREENIVASAN: And I don’t know if you were braced for it, but the kind of vitriol and hatred that you got online. I think anybody who was following your social feeds saw this. What did that do to you for — I mean, it seemed for months. And there has been substantive change on the program. Hank Azaria is no longer going to voice Apu’s character or the character night not be back. There’s other white actors who have said, I’ll no longer be — going to be voicing, you know, characters of color. So, there has been some progress made that that documentary started the conversation, but as you saw the responses, how did you make sense of it?

KONDABOLU: Well, it’s what I get for giving human beings the benefit of the doubt. Like, it serves me right. I thought we were going to have this documentary and have a conversation thoughtfully about representation and race and, you know, this hazing process that all people of color seem to go through, about the history of America and, you know, where we are as a society now compared to when “The Simpsons” came out. Instead it was, you know, death to me. Like, that wasn’t part of the documentary. And it serves me right. I had just a little bit of hope that just, perhaps, we would have a discussion, we would be in a national seminar class, just chipping away and contributing to each other’s points. And it serves me right. And so, no, I didn’t brace for it. I knew there would be some pushback, but not globally considering the movie was only available in like one or two countries. But it tells you, you know, at the end of the day, the substance does not matter, right? It feels like there’s a template for, you know, what you’re angry for this week on the internet. And I got plugged in for a couple years. And that’s just —

BELL: Yes. Not just for a week. There’s stuff I want to say about it that Hari maybe wouldn’t say or can’t say but I’ve seen it as being his friends. The thing I want to say, the show has made changes. They have not credited him with any of those changes. They have not invited him to the table to say, hey, you were right. In fact, Al Jean, who is a producer on “The Simpsons,” has been there since the early days has been — has trolled him on Twitter a couple times. Has come after him. Hank Azaria has never reached out to say, what you did, though it hurt, it led me to do this. Every time people talk about Apu leaving “The Simpsons,” Hari’s name and Doc Dunk (ph) come up. It regularly happens. I see it all the time and it makes me furious. And this is once again, white people trying to get credit for a brown person’s work because they are acting like, we just came to the point of changing this when it is all through him. And I think it’s totally despicable on the part of “The Simpsons” to act like this is some decision they came to because they were enlightened and not because this dude’s Doc actually made a difference.

KONDABOLU: I’m not going to comment on that but I’m definitely not going to disagree with anything he said.

SREENIVASAN: Hari, more Haris need friends like Kamau. That’s all I got to say to that. That’s — that was —

BELL: Find — everybody should find their Kamau. We’re pretty good friends.

SREENIVASAN: All right. Hari Kondabolu and W. Kamau Bell, thank you both for joining us.

BELL: Thank you.

KONDABOLU: Thank you so much for having us.