Kal Penn, best known for his roles in Harold and Kumar, House and Mira Nair’s The Namesake, tweeted a bunch of pictures of scripts from his early auditions as an actor. Being of Indian heritage and brown-skinned, more often than not the actor found himself reading for characters which served as the comic relief because of their ‘Indian’ accent. The actor said how most of the times, they just wanted him to speak like Apu from The Simpsons.

The apparent racism in the scripts was shockingly casual. Like that one time when they wanted a Gandhi lookalike, Snake Charmers and Fire-eaters…

He was often asked to lose his natural accent, and make his ‘Indian accent’ more ‘authentic’.

Penn said he would often try to make the line funny on its own merit, rather than use the crutch of an ‘accent’ but was shot down.

Because more often than not, his character only served as a plot-device to mine laughs.

And sometimes, the characters didn’t even have names. It was just the token brown dude.

He even expressed his affection for the show King of Queens, until he reached their doorstep for an audition.

The actor also shared the script of a commercial where he was bathed in Vaseline, so as to give him the ‘perspired look’ for a ‘Pakistani geek’.

However he went on to praise certain shows which chose to not go for the low-hanging fruits with their Indian characters like Buffy, 24.

He also had kind words for House creator David Shore, whose casting he called ‘color and gender-blinding’. He lauded him for staying true to his story, which eventually wound up getting excellent ratings for it too.

Wow, the racism was so innate it wasn’t even funny eh? Wonder what they have to say to it today.