The fourth episode of “Master of None,” the new widely beloved Netflix comedy from Aziz Ansari, opens with a montage of racist caricatures of Indian people, concluding with the most recent and possibly well-known instance: Ashton Kutcher’s 2012 ad for Popchips. In the ad, Kutcher dons brownface and a fake Indian accent to play a Bollywood producer named Raj.
The characters span decades and various media, but spliced together and presented one after another as they are consumed through the eyes of Ansari’s character, Dev, it doesn’t take any additional words to pick up what Ansari’s putting down. The way Indian people have been portrayed in the media is largely one-dimensional and really, really screwed up.
By the fourth episode, titled “Indians on TV,” the audience has met Dev’s parents, portrayed by Ansari’s real-life parents. We’ve had a chance to become emotionally invested in Dev and the lives of his friends. We see young Dev in 1990 ingesting a barrage of Indian stereotypes and little else. Then we’re hit with the Popchips imagery, and Kutcher’s plasticine construction of Indian-ness becomes even more gallingly apparent.
The fact that Ansari felt the need to address Kutcher’s three-year-old Popchips ad directly says a lot. When it came out, Anil Dash, a popular blogger and the chief executive of ThinkUp, expressed his exasperation not just with Popchips, Kutcher and the firms that birthed and promoted the commercial, but also the fact that the media covering the campaign were silent about Kutcher’s brownface ploy.
“The media who covered this campaign should admit their blindness to the obvious offensiveness of this campaign. Stuart Elliott in the New York Times and Sarah Anne Hughes in the Washington Post notably covered this campaign with no note of how obviously offensive the featured ad is. While Hughes has since updated her post to reflect some of the blowback, it’s astounding that this wouldn’t be obvious on first glance to those who are paid to understand media and culture.”
“Asians and Indians are the new clownable minority,” comedian Hasan Minhaj, now a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” lamented in a YouTube response to Popchips. “You have a s—ty accent and you’re not even being racist correctly. If you’re gonna be racist, come correct with your racism.”
Popchips eventually apologized for the ad, but within a year, the company was promoting its tortilla chips in New York by dispatching white actors dressed in sombreros and serapes to hand out samples, accompanied by a mariachi band.
In “Master of None,” Kutcher and the Popchips ad become a metric for racism. The commercial is not just bad, it’s so egregious that it’s racism iconography.
In a scene where Dev is explaining to a character named Anush why he doesn’t like “Short Circuit 2,” he tells him that Fisher Stevens, the actor who plays Ben Jahveri, is white.
“That’s a white actor,” Dev says. “They used brownface makeup.”
Anush, clearly dumbfounded, looks up. “Like the Popchips commercial?”
For Dash, 40, seeing the ad contextualized in a meaningful way resulted in mixed feelings.
“It was satisfying at that level, but also just reminded me that nothing happened,” Dash said in an instant message conversation with The Post. “They insulted Mexican folks next, and there’s no impact on their business. What would it take for Walmart or Target to say ‘we value the business of South Asian folks enough to hold Popchips accountable?’ ”
The entire episode is a clever bit of meta-commentary on race and casting, not unlike what Amani Starnes did with “United Colors of Amani” and Andrea Lewis tackles in “Black Actress.” In a scene where Dev is explaining the Rule of Two — you can’t have two Indian characters on a show because then it becomes an “Indian show” — there are three Desi characters in the scene: Dev, Ravi (Ravi Patel) and Anush (Gerrard Lobo). Not only are there three Indians in the same shot in the same episode, but they’re clearly three distinct characters with different interests and opinions. Anush is a pretty boy who’s clearly a little too obsessed with Crossfit. Ravi and Dev, while both Indian American and both actors, have different philosophies about performing Indian accents, especially in bit parts or comedic roles.
This, too, was significant.
“We haven’t had very many well-rounded characters,” Dash told The Post. “The recent progress have mostly been pretty broad comedic characters, which at least was something, but they didn’t have much in the way of an interior life and only interacted with white people, which is just weird.”
In an interview with Van Winkle’s, Patel spoke about the real-life differences between himself and Ansari. “I don’t find stereotypical roles to always be offensive. I think stereotypes are there for a reason and are a very big part of comedy. It’s interesting, [Aziz’s] issue is specifically with Indian stereotypes, but you don’t see him walking away from other [racial] stereotypes,” Patel said. “You need to look at it on a case-by-case basis. Like in ‘Transformers,’ Michael Bay wanted me to wear a turban. I was like ‘Why do you want me to wear a turban?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s funny,’ and I said ‘Well, that’s not a good enough reason to wear a turban.’ I’ve stood up for stuff that’s offensive every time.”
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