'The Simpsons' To 'The Problem With Apu': Drop Dead
The Simpsons addressed complaints about its caricature of an Indian convenience store owner by making clear that it ... doesn't really care.
Comedian Hari Kondabolu made a documentary in 2017 called . It's not very long — less than an hour. In it, he interrogates the legacy of Apu, the convenience store owner on voiced by Hank Azaria. Kondabolu talked to other actors and comics who longed for more South Asian representation, only to find that at the time, Apu was just about all there was. And Apu was not only voiced by a white actor, but he was doing what Azaria has acknowledged is a take on Peter Sellers doing an Indian accent in the movie . In other words, he based his caricature of an accent on someone else's caricature of an accent. Or, as Kondabolu said on W. Kamau, "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father."
