Photo collage of John Cho and Kal Penn as Harold and Kumar from the movie "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," with the film's poster on the side and a still of the movie in the background.

Why ‘Harold & Kumar’ was more than just a stoner movie

On its 20th anniversary, a look at how the iconic comedy highlights the generation gap between Asian American kids and their immigrant parents

Words by Soham Gadre

“Turn it off…TURN IT OFF,” was what my mom screamed in increasingly higher volume at my dad the night in 2005 they fatefully decided to watch Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. The only reason my parents were even interested in the movie was because it was the first Hollywood comedy they had come across that featured an Indian lead. So much for representation right? Their enjoyment of this “sinful” comedy screeched to a halt the moment John Cho walks in on a bare-naked Kal Penn clipping his pubic hair in the mirror. My parents grew up on mainstream Bollywood films that have a long history of being ruthlessly censored by a puritanical mandate. There was a clear gap between how much fun my South Asian and Asian friends and I had watching this classic 21st Century buddy comedy road-trip movie and the shock and horror of our parents.

Harold & Kumar, which came out 20 years ago this week, struck a particular personal chord for me from the fact that not only did I grow up as an Indian kid in the United States, but I grew up in New Jersey where the film is set (though it was filmed in several locations outside of the state, mainly in Ontario, Canada). The White Castle they go to is supposed to be in Cherry Hill, but the closest one is actually in South Brunswick. Nevertheless, my friends and I found the characters of Harold and Kumar to be a close enough reflective model of our “lifestyle.” We did go to White Castle a lot, especially after spending a couple hours bumming around smoking weed. We did end up in the same kind of dead-end corporate jobs that they did despite loftier expectations of ourselves. There was a large part of the film that combined both the Asian immigrant self-awareness about race in the greater culture, along with the willing assimilation from having grown up in the white suburbs. New Jersey is the fourth most diverse state in America, but whiteness is still the default setting. Yet, as many Asians who grew up in the United States to immigrant parents will tell you, the generational divide between our home lives and our social lives can be so vast it  gives you whiplash. And that whiplash had perhaps never been so clearly manifested as it was in the way my parents and I reacted to Harold & Kumar.

I guess I probably should be happy that they turned the movie off when they did, because it's not like the sexual and cultural “perversion” that my parents felt was poisoning their prudish sensibilities (not to mention corrupting my innocence) was relegated to the first 15 minutes. In many ways, it only gets worse from there. Written by two white guys, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, the film presents a shockingly refreshing authenticity of the experience of growing up as an Asian person in the United States. Naturally, it would require white writers—particularly 20 years ago—to get this kind of thing past anyone in Hollywood. One of the things the writers did to maintain this authenticity was to write “ethnic-specific” scenes in the script. Hurwitz and Schlossberg had long-time friends who were Indian and Asian, and their decision to create a story centered around these characters required the appropriate level of understanding of the cultural nuances that exist at the peripheries of American and immigrant cultures.

Harold & Kumar’s reputation as a stoner comedy helped bridge the cultural gap between Asian/Indian upbringing and that of white kids in New Jersey.

The writers did well by indicating that the heart and essence of Harold and Kumar were undetachable from their ethnicities despite them having become assimilated into white American culture in several ways. This was a conscious decision to make it more difficult for studio executives to whitewash the characters—or suggest as one did, to have the main characters be white and Black instead. Harold & Kumar’s reputation as a stoner comedy helped bridge the cultural gap between Asian/Indian upbringing and that of white kids in New Jersey. It turned, especially for kids of my generation in high school around the time of the film’s release, the protagonists into becoming more generally relatable and also aspirational.

While the movie found a general appeal among American audiences, it solidified its relatability within the Asian American community through its culturally universal comedy. When Harold and Kumar are stopped by a white police officer for attempting to jaywalk at 2:30 a.m., he makes fun of Kumar’s first name suggesting it has “five o’s and two u’s” while Harold’s anglicized name is something he should be proud of. The scene breaks down a very distinct and often pondered cultural dichotomy: Why some Asian immigrants (Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, among others) more often adopt Westernized names while others (Indian, Pakistani, Japanese) generally do not. Even the film’s stereotype jokes, like the scene with the Indian convenience store clerk (a staple of American comedy from The Simpsons to Linklater’s SubUrbia) or Harold and Kumar both being naturally good doctors, are incorporated in humorous ways that feel natural to include as hijinks and side plots in this kind of road movie.

What separated this movie from the patronizing way a lot of representation in Hollywood feels is that it accurately toes the line of assimilation into American culture that happened between Asian kids who grew up here and their parents who did not. The crux of many of the jokes in the movie stems from the societal perception of its two main leads as being straight-laced, awkward, and not well adjusted. The opening scene involved two white co-workers who leave a bunch of their work for Harold to complete and remark that, “Those Asian guys love crunching numbers, you probably just made his weekend.” In contrast, their parents see them as being complete failures because they aren’t straight-laced enough. Kumar being a pothead, something his doctor father and brother scold him about in the hospital scene, shed the light on a lot of suburban Indian youth as being much more adventurous and branching out of the traditionalist boundaries that their parents set for them. My parents certainly were not aware that I smoked weed for a good number of years, and if they did find out during that time, they would almost certainly have treated it as seriously as committing murder.

Over the years my parents have come to appreciate the movie and others like it. As time has gone on and as my love for cinema has grown since my adolescence, I’ve recommended more risqué films to get them out of their comfort zone, and it’s generally worked. Hollywood, too, is finally seeing the importance of sharing more of these kinds of stories. Not only are we seeing more movies than ever about American Asians, but more specifically, like in the case of Everything Everywhere All at Once, ones which recognize the generational gaps between families where the kids are raised in the United States when their parents were not. In that regard, and despite it being what many brushed off as a silly stoner comedy, Harold & Kumar feels like a watershed moment.

Published on August 1, 2024

Words by Soham Gadre

Soham Gadre is a writer based in Chicago. You can find his writing in Fangoria, Paste Magazine, Screen Slate, The Film Stage, and Polygon among other publications.