Also of note, that episode features “Big Bang Theory” scratcher lotto tickets, which I’m quite sure is not a random choice.
Korean shopkeeper guy?
I have light-ish hair, I’m kind of fat, and I smile a lot.
I took a class, and the students were mostly brand-new immigrants.
Some of the Japanese women in the class giggled during a break and told me I look like Colonel Sanders from KFC.
I had never thought that I looked anything like him, and no one else said it about me before or since, but… This is just how people’s brains work. It’s not possible to change human nature like that, to make us all stop categorizing - and therefore also not possible to get us to stop making errors or inappropriate generalizations in that categorizing.
Correction… rarely mentioned.
Jay showed up… once. In the 27th season (one year before The Problem with Apu came out). And the voice actor who voiced Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) was actually in “The Problem with Apu”. It actually wasn’t a bad episode in dealing with, for lack of a better word, the problem with Apu. If the Simpsons pointed to that episode and mentioned they were working on exploring those issues further (maybe having Jay, or another Americanized Apu relation, show up a bit more), it would have been ok. But they decided to double down and say there isn’t a problem with Apu.
Fat Tony, for one, is voiced by an Italian American.
The issue that people are willfully misinterpreting to serve their own ignorance and comfort is that Apu was really one of the first regularly appearing Indian characters on American television.
“What about Fat Tony he’s bad for Italians”…except we can literally name hundreds of Italian characters who are not like Fat Tony.
“What about Groundskeeper Willie!”…we can also name hundreds of Scottish characters not like Willie.
“What about Apu!”…The number of prominent Indian characters on television can fit on two hands.
Representation matters.
BUT- the point I was getting at was–what happens moving forward? In an ideal world, what should the Simpsons do? The character itself is a well-developed supporting character, but is the baggage of the past too much?
But what is the baggage? Is it purely the exaggerated accent? Apu is a fairly normal person on the show.
I mean the central theme of the show is a typical fat stupid american father, with a stereotypical self righteous liberal daughter, rudderless son and nagging wife.
Maybe the issue is that satirists know that it’s human nature to stereotype, human nature to mischaracterize or miscategorize the unknown or the unfamiliar,
…and right now there are more and more people who feel that they have decided on behalf of society that since human nature is not all good, not all justice and compassion, not all sweetness and light, then human nature has been cancelled until further notice.
I AM a SJW, as far as I can tell. But I’m not stupid. Humans are humans. People are not always nice. Satire is one way of helping to deal with the world.
Maybe we need to satirize satirists. 
Which is a fair question. The Simpsons is not necessarily where the ‘battle’ (as it were) is, even if their response to The Problem with Apu was tone deaf.
FWIW, I think that people should watch The Problem with Apu, or Master of None’s episode “Indians on TV” (4th ep of the 1st season) to get a better viewpoint.
- Is it the fault of The Simpsons that their character was prominent or uncommon? Sure, representation matters, nobody can dispute that - but Groening was not writing society, he was writing a show. His show. A writer getting a call saying “We’re sorry, but our aggregate numbers show that your Dutch character can’t eat licorice or smoke weed, and unfortunately the bicycle is right out as well, because there aren’t enough other Dutch characters on American prime-time TV to balance those out” - well, WTF?
- I think the whole Simpsons show has accumulated so much baggage, and lost so much steam, that it’s just time.
What is a win in this battle though? Indian Americans are a very small percentage of the population (~1%?). A meaningful percentage of that are new immigrants who actually do still have an accent and happen to be store owners, engineers or programmers. I watched the #totallybiased bit that inspired the doc, how many famous Indian actors will be “fair”? Will it only be fair when the stereotype is all Indian Americans are articulte, cosmopolitan comedians?
So, I’m calling businesses in New Jersey to sell pest control. I call a motel and ask for the name on the lead, a Mr Patel. I’m transferred to a man with an Indian accent and ask, “Are you Mr Patel?”
He replied angrily, “No, I am not. Do you think that because I own a motel my name is Patel?”
I was taken aback, stammering, “It’s just the name on the lead.”
Patel had sold the joint a few years earlier, making this lead relatively current. At least he hadn’t died ten years ago.
Worse yet, one from Cicero, formerly “owned” by Al Capone. But out here we’re used to the Guys.
It probably would be nice if Indians could speak in their own accents as opposed to a white man mimicking a white man trying to do an Indian accent (Apu’s accent isn’t really an Indian accent - it’s Hank Azaria mimicking Peter Sellers doing an exaggerated accent). For example, listen to Kumail Nanjiani, who rose to prominence playing a computer programmer in Silicon Valley.
And I do think that the current trend of Indian roles in TV shows is getting better - Tom Haverford in Parks & Rec played by Aziz Ansari, Aziz’s own character of Dev Shah in Master of None, Lawrence Kutner in House M.D. (played by Kal Penn), etc. Things like that are good. And you can have Indian actors in more stereotypical roles and it comes out fine - Nanjiani as mentioned above is a good example.
So I do think that people are doing better in the portrayal of South Asians, but the Simpsons’ response to the documentary was tone deaf.
“Please do not give peanuts to my god!”
I totally understand why SE Asians would find Apu offensive. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to contend with negative cartoon white male stereotypes at every turn. Shame on shows like The Simpsons & Family Guy & Loony Tunes & Animaniacs & South Park for always giving the white guy a pass.
I think a tone-deaf response to a tone-deaf complaint might be a weird kind of poetic justice. But I think it might not work.
If the portrayal of Apu had not been crude and inaccurate, it would have been wrong for the show.
I didn’t even like The Simpsons that much, and I didn’t watch it often, but I did at times pick up on the fact that it was probably not a documentary.
I am having a hard time figuring out why so many are criticizing a stupid cartoon for not being a documentary.
Rude jokes are rude, and rudeness is bad.
OK. That is not the problem.
The problem comes from “…and so because rudeness is bad, rude jokes are not actually jokes, and I declare them Not Funny”.
I’m sorry, but what people find funny is not for anyone but themselves to say. Bad taste is absolutely a problem, and misrepresentation of people is a problem, but those are completely separate problems from funny vs not funny.
In a different direction: Indians did not elect Apu to anything. Neither did people who work in convenience stores. He represents Apu, not Indians or store keepers. Isn’t it conceited to imagine “He looks like a rude cartoon of me, so this show must be about me!”? What I’ve said there is not right either, because it’s clear that Apu is intended to represent something and not just a free-floating entity - but look, it’s not simple.
It was India at one point, but he is of Pakistani ancestry.
All I can say to some of the people in this thread is try having some empathy. Maybe, just maybe, people complaining are doing it for a reason.
Of course people complaining are doing so for a reason!
That doesn’t automatically make their analysis of the situation correct. It’s possible to be hurt by something you saw in a TV show without being an expert on how to create TV shows. It’s possible to be wronged and still not be an ethics professor. It’s possible to be a good person and be incorrect about something.
And it’s possible to hold compassion highly as a value without claiming that compassion is the only value that exists.