An Evening With Hari Kondabolu

I have become a big fan of comedian Hari Kondabolu through his podcast Politically Re-Active with W. Kamau Bell. Since I missed Hari’s show in Oakland by a week I decided to fly up to Seattle to finally see him perform live at the Neptune theater. Hari did two sold out shows tonight (I went to the 10pm show), which were taped for a Netflix special. After being welcomed by comedy legend Bobcat Goldthwait (who was directing the special), Liz Miele came out and did a short stand-up set to warm up the crowd. Her material touched on topics around family, friends, and health and wellbeing.

Hari came out to massive cheers from the sold out crowd. He started out with some inter-city rivalry jokes about Portland, which played well with the Seattle crowd. Hari covered a lot of material during his set, from the political with Trump and the unleashing of overt racism and sexism that has resulted, to the personal with having people pronounce his name correctly, his relationship and interactions with his parents, and love for mangoes (#MangoTalk). Hari is really good at exploring issues in an intelligent way from different angles, which was the case for his observations on gentrification, healthcare and airport security (which I could really relate to having been on five different flights over the past two weeks). While I was hoping for all new material, I did recognise some bits from his previous comedy album releases and YouTube clips, which was understandable considering he was taping a special.

As these shows were being taped there were points throughout the set where Hari would pause to re-state something for edits. At end they had to do a few extra crowd shots for the opening and closing credits, so while those were set up Bobcat and Hari told a couple of funny off the record stories to the crowd. I'm glad I was finally able to see Hari do stand-up in person, and hopefully he will make a return visit to Australia in 2018. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, I would strongly urge you to watch Hari's fantastic documentary The Problem with Apu.

Here's a clip of one of my favorite bits from the evening about Hari's own healthcare plan: