classnews - Bowdoin College

COMEDIAN HARI KONDABOLU ’04
USES THE POWER OF COMEDY AS AN
INSTRUMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
BY EDGAR ALLEN BEEM
PHOTOS BY KARSTEN MORAN ’05
Twenty minutes before his audience arrives,
comedian Hari Kondabolu is busy arranging
chairs in Smith Auditorium, the Sills Hall
venue to which his performance has been assigned.
He had hoped for Pickard Theater and would have
settled for Kresge Auditorium, but here he is relegated to
“the third largest venue on campus.”
Mock indignation is one of Hari Kondabolu’s strong
suits. By the end of the evening he will be complaining
that Smith Auditorium is “the seventh or eighth largest
venue on campus.”
“You’ve humbled me again, Bowdoin.”
Hari Kondabolu ’04 returned to Bowdoin on April 14
at the invitation of the Asian Student Association to en-
36 BOWDOIN SUMMER 2011
STAND
Up
tertain and provoke 120 students, faculty and visitors with
his cutting and cutting edge brand of comedy. A rather
saturnine young man casually dressed in brown hooded
sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, Kondabolu uses comedy as
an instrument of social change, winning often uncomfortable
laughs with jokes about sexism, class, politics, immigration,
and popular culture.
It was the relative lack of diversity, however, that struck
Kondabolu when he first arrived on campus in 2000. He
jokes that Maine was so white that when it snowed everyone
disappeared.
“You could see me from space. Oh, there’s a speck of
chocolate on the lens. No, that’s Hari Kondabolu, Bowdoin
College Class of ’04.”