Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film

6. "Running from the Joint": Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Comic Narrative after 9/11

6 “Running from the Joint” Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Comic Narrative after 9/11 This is America, dude, and as long as I have my freedom of speech no one is going to shut me up. Kumar, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, not only fits into the genre of stoner films but also is part of a growing body of films that chronicle the events and fallout of the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Hollywood and American television were initially cautious to develop programming and scripts that addressed topics related to the aftermath of September 11, 2001, including topics such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, and the detentions at Guantánamo Bay. Popular comedians, such as David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Jon Stewart, struggled over how to address the situation in an era where every event, no matter how serious or tragic, was once thought to be fair game for parody. Paul Achter points out that after 9/11, then Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani was asked to appear on the opening segment of Saturday Night Live, where producer Lorne Michaels asked him, “Is it OK to be funny again?” Giuliani’s subsequent “benediction of comedy on SNL” was able to “mobilize a comic institution in the service of a country’s need to laugh. Other commentators stated the mayor’s point directly: comedy after 9/11 could be useful to audiences, and artists and comedians had a duty to provide it.”1 But while comedy was permitted, making comic narratives on the war on terror did not necessarily follow in mass media. Documentaries, such as Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), The Ground Dave_Indian text.indd 127 1/8/13 10:36 AM Truth (2006), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008), delivered exposés of the attacks, the life of soldiers and veterans, and the abuses at detainment facilities. Hollywood dramas, to name a few, such as Reign over Me (2007), directed by Mike Binder; Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006); United 93 (2006), directed by Paul Greengrass; and later, war dramas, such as In the Valley of Elah (2007), directed by Paul Haggis; Lions for Lambs (2007), directed by Robert Redford; The Hurt Locker (2008), directed by Kathryn Bigelow; and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), directed by Stephen Daldry, portray narratives of the after-effects for Americans of 9/11 both at home and abroad. The film industry in India produced several narratives that addressed how the attacks impacted South Asians in the United States. Premier Indian actors starred in Bollywood films, such as Kurbaan (2009), directed by Renzil D’Silva; New York (2009), directed by Kabir Khan; and My Name Is Khan (2010), directed by Karan Johar. These films were seen in international venues all over the world and received both critical and popular attention in the United States and abroad. The number of narratives that addressed the war on terror proved that it was suitable subject for documentaries and dramas. However, comic treatments of the repercussions of 9/11, aside from Albert Brooks’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005) and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), directed by Larry Charles, have been largely absent. Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay fills this void in an unexpected way.2 The film, released in April 2008, was second at the box office (after Tina Fey’s Baby Mama) on opening weekend. The second film in the Harold and Kumar franchise was one of industry’s top-one-hundred highest- grossing films of the year, making over $30 million at the theaters. The film is a popular release on DVD and continues to appeal to a wide demographic that includes fans of the stoner genre, ethnic comedy, and the buddy film. Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is less about the immigrant story and more about the experiences of racial profiling and security for Asian Americans, particularly South Asian Americans during the George W. Bush era (2000–2008). Like the prior film, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), this film has all the elements of a classic stoner film, which include the possession and consumption of marijuana, evading the law, outsmarting inept agents of national security and law enforcement, and narrative...