F R O M FERRIS BUELLER TO KUMAR PATE L

Comic Racial Subversion and the Globalization of the Boy-Ironist

Archetype in Hollwood Cinema

Sonny Sidhu
Fall 2008

From Ferris Bueller to Kumar Patel 1

 FROM FERRIS BUELLER TO KUMAR PATEL
Comic Racial Subversion and the Globalization of the Boy-Ironist Archetype in Hollwood Cinema

Sonny Sidhu
Swarthmore College
English Literature 077: South Asian Americans in Asian America
Professor Bakirathi Mani
Fall 2008

Kal Pennʼs Kumar Patel, the ultra-ironist hero of the Harold & Kumar cycle of films, is a novel
creation, not least because he is the first South Asian American comic character to earn endur-
ing, iconic status within the American pop-cultural mainstream. Pennʼs Kumar also stands as a
singular figure in the long tradition of American stoner-comedy funnymen. He is not merely a
laughable, wasted oaf in the classic Tommy Chong mold, but rather is presented to the audi-
ence as a richly intelligent and highly capable slacker with a particular knack for getting into and
out of trouble. Kumar is therefore a natural heir to Matthew Broderickʼs Ferris Bueller, and in-
deed the entire pantheon of subversive boy-ironist heroes in Reagan-era television and film, a
character type extensively studied by media critic Mark Crispin Miller in the 1986 essay “Deride
and Conquer,” and by anthropologist and cultural theorist Elizabeth G. Traube in her 1989 essay
“Secrets of Success in Postmodern Society.”

Like the young male stars of 1980s film and television comedies, Penn specializes in conveying,
as Traube puts it, “a cool, breezy, highly verbal, yet distinctly boyish style of rebellious inde-
pendence” (273). His portrayal of Kumar locates the character within “an assortment of… ro-
mantic, roguish heroes, boys who prefer play to work, who succeed through tricks or daring
deeds, like the adult men-on-the-make of humorous literature, and who routinely subvert estab-
lished conventions and repressive authority” (Traube 282). Borrowing from Traube, for Ku-
mar—as for his forebears in 1980s comic cinema and TV—“right conduct is defined in uncom-
promisingly remissive terms, as self-gratification, excess, indulgence, release, the playful over-
coming of every obstacle to desire” (283-4). Yet, as Mark Crispin Miller observes of Kumarʼs
character type, “the ironist appears to see right through whatever pretense or dishonesty, pom-
posity or inhibition he confronts” (218). With his penchant for adventure and his innate ability to
undermine abusive figures of authority, Kumar is, like Ferris Bueller and others before him, the
“heroic representative of a rising generation,” whose caustic worldview is not a personality de-
fect but rather the source of his power and appeal (Miller 196).

For Elizabeth G. Traube the boy-ironist character type, exemplified in latter-day cinema by Kal
Pennʼs Kumar Patel, serves as a form of “class instruction for elites, a narrative pedagogy that
celebrates a socially useful, seductively antiauthoritarian style” appropriate to advancement
within the personality-driven postmodernist corporation (284). While a given heroʼs rebellious
streak may get him in trouble within the humdrum bureaucracy of public high school, the films
seem to imply, it may take him far in the competitive, fast-paced, image-driven, and eminently
desirable world of corporate capitalism. Alternately, Mark Crispin Miller theorizes that the cool,
detached ironic gaze of the subversive boy hero type is intended to glamorize and reinforce a
particular mode of viewing essential to the survival of American capitalism in the age of televi-
sion: “TV has gone beyond the explicit celebration of commodities to the implicit reinforcement

From Ferris Bueller to Kumar Patel 2

of that spectatorial posture which TV requires of us,” Miller writes. “Now it is not enough just to
proffer an infinitude of goods; TV must also try to get its viewers to prefer the passive, hungry
watching of those goods, must lead us to believe that our spectatorial inaction is the only sort of
action possible” (193). By “implicitly extolling the fixed posture of ironic looking-on,” stories that
center on an ultra-ironist young hero, according to Miller, reinforce “a spectatorial slackness, the
same attitude of passive irony that the viewer exemplifies to the precise extent that he or she
laughs along” (218).

Both theories will prove useful in building a further understanding of the fictional Kumar Patelʼs
cinematic lineage and appeal to wide, racially mixed audiences. But any analysis of this char-
acter must necessarily begin and end with a consideration of the unique and highly particular
racial, cultural, and socioeconomic identity that Kumar, as a South Asian American child of pro-
fessional immigrant parents, inhabits and must negotiate over the course of the Harold & Kumar
films. Namely, Kumar is a prisoner of the model minority discourse that surrounds post-1965
South Asian immigrants to the United States. He is subject to intense academic and profes-
sional pressure from his careerist family, and exists within a social milieu that expects a person
of his appearance to be bright, useful, and shy—mentally gifted, but pitifully lacking in those
traits of personality most valued by American culture and therefore consigned to perpetual
second-class status. Seen in this light, Kumarʼs cool rebelliousness is an obvious attempt to
subvert the model minority myth, which in his life serves mostly as a drain on his autonomy.
Kumarʼs casual libertinism is not the hedonistic self-destruction of a nihilist, but rather an implic-
itly political act of self-assertion, through which he is able to finally reject the constraints of the
model minority myth and renounce the lasting advantages he might otherwise have derived
from it. So it is that Kumar is presented as a preternaturally confident success hero, in the ironic
Reagan-era mold, despite (but not in spite of) his aimless, drug-addled lifestyle. It is precisely
Kumarʼs confidence, his characteristically American wit and charm, that assures him access to
objective success outside the confining, careerist discourse of the South Asian ʻmodel minority.ʼ
Although the audience is told that Kumar possesses perfect MCAT scores, and sees firsthand
that he is a natural whiz in the operating room, Kumar consciously models himself, in opposition
to his stereotypically accomplished father and brother, as the postmodernist hero of his own life,
relying on the power of his personality, rather than advancement through quiet diligence, to get
what he wants. In the successful-boy-ironist genre of 1980s films, according to Elizabeth
Traube, “disrespect for adult authority… entails a willful rejection of the Protestant ethic of self-
improvement through work” (Traube 283). In the Harold & Kumar cycle, as far as Kumar is con-
cerned, disrespect for authority entails a willful rejection of the distinctly South Asian American,
upper-middle class professional ethic of self- improvement through work and study.

Importantly, Kumarʼs perpetual state of rebellion takes the guise of a focused, insistent state of
nonproductivity and consumption. According to Mark Crispin Miller, the 1980s comic ironists
“function[ed], persistently if indirectly, to promote consumption as a way of life… The spectacle
[was] an endless advertisement for the posture of inert modernity” (226-8). The archetypal
ironist-heroʼs detached irreverence was a model for how a smart, hip young subject of American
capitalism ought best to spend his or her time: watching, rather than doing; quipping, rather than
contributing; consuming, rather than producing. In the character of Kumar Patel this association,
formerly implicit and metaphorical, becomes explicit and literal. Kumar in fact appears to have
no occupation, besides cynically bombing the occasional medical school entrance interview so
as to appear satisfactorily occupied to his beneficent father (perhaps the most explicitly Bueller-
esque of his many parental manipulations). Rather, he spends his days glued to the couch,
bong in hand, consuming commercial products and images even as he consumes an illicit sub-

From Ferris Bueller to Kumar Patel 3

stance that makes his appetite for those commercial products and images all the more acute. In
other words, Kumar explicitly embraces the comic ideal of ironic spectatorship (left unconnected
to TV-viewing habits in the genreʼs 1980s heyday, according to Miller), and places his habits of
consumption at the very foundation of his self-identity. For Kumar, the impulse to consume is
more than mere desire. It is his right, his privilege, his duty, and his existential calling. Whatever
consumptive goal Kumarʼs sights are set on—whether it be a faraway meal of White Castle bur-
gers or a risky transatlantic toke in an airplane lavatory—that goal takes precedence over all
other considerations, marking Kumar as perhaps the ultimate media-age consumer. Moreover,
his envisioning of his own familyʼs immigrant narrative places the impulse to consume commer-
cial goods above the more obvious impulse to pursue a socially valued career in a first-world
economy: contemplating, at long last, the Cherry Hill White Castle near the end of the first film,
Kumar tells Harold by way of encouragement, “This is the America our parents set out for.”

Kal Pennʼs portrayal of Kumar Patel differs in one crucial respect from the successful- boy-
ironist archetype as it became inscribed during the Reagan era. In “Secrets of Success in Post-
modern Society,” Traube writes that Ferris Bueller “is an appropriate inhabitant of the postmod-
ern narrative universe. He is a creature composed entirely of surfaces, the product of the multi-
ple masks he assumes. When the film ends, we know little more about him than we did at the
beginning, or rather, we know him only through his artful stagings of self” (280). Unlike Ferris
and his (uniformly Caucasian) ilk, Kumarʼs unique manipulative power stems not from the thor-
oughly postmodern ability to show and hide different faces in different situations, but rather from
his possession of a single face that happens to mean different things to different people. Unlike
the crafty comic heroes of the 1980s screen, Kumar rarely changes the way he acts from scene
to scene, and yet, the simple fact of his racialized appearance affects different people in differ-
ent ways. To some, his appearance marks him as an easy target for taunting and abuse, while
to others it renders him evil personified, an immediate threat to Americaʼs national security. To
some, he appears to be a degenerate slacker, while to others his appearance marks him as the
first person upon whom to call in a medical emergency. Kumar rarely engages in any sort of
conscious performance to elicit such varied responses, although he is consistently able to ma-
nipulate the reactions of others to his personal benefit. Every successful-boy-ironist comic hero
has a special ʻpowerʼ over others, and this is Kumarʼs. That this power stems from a racially
particular font—namely, the hybrid possibilities of belonging to racial group that enjoys model
minority status in America—must be considered carefully.

In Elizabeth Traubeʼs reading of the character archetype of which Kumar Patel is a descendent,
the comic heroʼs multifaceted, postmodernist self-projection operates in service of a corporate
capitalist ideal of success through strength of “personality,” rather than force of labor. In Mark
Crispin Millerʼs interpretation, the successful-boy-ironist archetypeʼs detached, spectatorial cyni-
cism operates in service of a commercial ideal of passive viewing and consumption. In the Har-
old & Kumar cycle, Kumarʼs eager embrace of personality as his greatest asset and his whole-
sale engagement with a lifestyle of passive consumption both operate in service of an assimila-
tionist ideal of South Asian American-ness. Through Kumarʼs heroic success the films seem to
imply that, while diligent study and hard work may have sufficed to gain a generation of South
Asians entrance to the United States, these values can only result in the social marginalization
of their second-generation children, as well as the containment of their potential within a small
handful of techno-scientific professional fields. For a second-generation South Asian American
to succeed in American society, to take his rightful place as a first-class citizen, and perhaps
even ascend to the level of generational hero, he must abandon his parentsʼ antiquated,
capitalist-yet-not-consumerist ideals of education and hard work and embrace the disaffected,

From Ferris Bueller to Kumar Patel 4

unambitious, consumerist ideal of American youth first enshrined in the successful- boy-ironist
film and television comedies of the 1980s. Kal Pennʼs Kumar Patel is the subversive hero of a
generation of South Asian American youths, but it is important to note that, like the subversive
screen heroes who came two decades before him, his overt iconoclasm serves to bolster, rather
than undermine status quo power structures. Simply put, Kumar Patel is an assimlationist ideal,
promising limitless social power in exchange for the willing abrogation of racial and cultural
(read: South Asian) difference.

Works Cited

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Dir. Danny Leiner. Perf. John Cho, Kal Penn. DVD. New
Line Home Video, 2004.

Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. Dir. Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg. Perf.
John Cho, Kal Penn. DVD. New Line Home Video, 2008.

Miller, Mark Crispin. "Deride and Conquer." Watching Television. Ed. Todd Gitlin. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986.

Traube, Elizabeth. "Secrets of Success in Postmodernist Society." Cultural Anthropology

4(1989): 273-300.

From Ferris Bueller to Kumar Patel 5