Kal Penn Doesn’t Find Time Magazine’s Xenophobia Hilarious

Actor Kal Penn, who starred in hit television shows like “24” and “House M.D.,” but also in the hit feature film “Harold & Kumar” (2004), is speaking out on a recent Time magazine piece written by columnist Joel Stein. In the editorial, called “My Own Private India,” Stein sets out to argue that his hometown of Edison, New Jersey was different from how he knew it when he was still living there because of Indian immigrants.

Though he reportedly set out to write a humorous piece, all that Stein managed to do was to compile a sum of clichés about immigrants and then put it on paper in a most offensive manner. His editorial is far from funny or even mildly entertaining: it is the clearest, most upsetting example of xenophobia and, what’s even worse, it’s being run in a publication like the Times, with an excellent reputation and exposure, Penn says.

“I want to applaud Joel Stein for his hilarious account of Edison, New Jersey in his Time magazine article this week, ‘My Own Private India’; it is as unique and groundbreaking as Thomas Alva himself. Were it not for the intelligent, fresh sense of humor of individuals like Mr. Stein, the world may never know about Americans who happen to be of Indian descent. Gags about impossibly spicy food? I’d never heard those before! Multiple Gods with multiple arms? Multiple laughs! Recounting racial slurs like ‘dot-head’? Oh, Mr. Stein, is too good! I don’t know how he comes up with such unique bits. (I was worried that he’d missed an opportunity to joke about Dr. King’s predecessor, Gandhi, but I see that he got to that hilarity on Twitter. More never-before-heard satire!)” Penn writes in his column on the Huffington Post.

“Growing up a few miles from Edison, NJ, I always thought it was hilarious when I’d get the [expletive] kicked out of me by kids like Stein who would yell ‘go back to India, dothead!’ I was always ROTFLMAO when people would assume that I wasn’t American. He really captured the brilliant humor in that one too! Critics might call Mr. Stein’s humor super-tired or as played out as the jokes about that cheap Jewish car that stopped on a dime to pick it up, or that African American kid who got marked absent at night school. Although unlike Stein’s Indian American piece, in 2010 those other jokes don’t show up in mainstream media like Time Magazine. I wonder why that is...” the actor further argues.

Penn is not the only one to put Stein on blast either, as several media outlets have already pointed out that Time should exercise a bit more control when it came to the stories it ran online. Users too seem to have complained a lot, for the Time piece now comes amended with two separate statements: one from the magazine, which basically says that they’re apologizing for the offense, and one from Stein himself, in which he says his sole purpose was to explain his shock at how immigration had changed his hometown, making it virtually unrecognizable.