Brooklyn comedian Hari Kondabolu is locked in a steamy romance with Seattle. And who could blame him? He has felt the Seattle Hug phenomenon in all its glory, the unsung—and very real—opposite of our fabled Freeze. He enjoys a dedicated local following that packs out his shows on the regular, his main writing partner Aham Oluo lives here, and weirdly enough, it was while residing in Seattle that Kondabolu officially launched his comedy career to the national stage. "My only ambition was to do Bumbershoot, and within a year, I did it," he remembers. "The next thing I knew, I had an e-mail from HBO. That's crazy. You don't get discovered out of Seattle—you get discovered out of New York or LA. It's still weird when I think about it. I owe Seattle everything."

Kondabolu grew up in Queens and came of age absorbing sets at the Comedy Cellar, where he found superstars like Jerry Seinfeld, Marc Maron, and Colin Quinn. He came to Seattle from 2005 to 2007 to work as an AmeriCorps human-rights organizer, doing standup comedy by night at offbeat venues like the Eclectic Theatre (formerly Odd Duck Studio), focusing on the topic of race. He enjoyed the freedom of our considerably lower-stakes scene—artists being artists, weirdos being weirdos. No pressure. "Nobody was famous," he says. "It was road comics, some polished headliners, and a bunch of people who just wanted to try it because somebody told them they were funny. I certainly wasn't going to get that back in New York." In Seattle's self-consciously-white atmosphere, Kondabolu thrived with surefire jokes about indie rock and Weezer, but it was the jokes about equality and white privilege that hit deeper and made him a breath of fresh air—he was a uniter who called out racism where he saw it: everywhere.

The comedy took off, which surprised him—he was planning on becoming a lawyer. In 2007, he appeared at the new-talent showcase at HBO's US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen—an important festival where many younger comedians were seen for the first time by industry people. He later got his master's in human rights from the London School of Economics before moving back to Brooklyn, but the HBO festival begat appearances on Kimmel and Conan, a 30-minute Comedy Central special, and a writing job on the TV show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. A full-time comedian now, Kondabolu released his debut comedy album, Waiting for 2042, this month.

Criticism of racism is at the heart of Waiting for 2042. The cover photo features a vivid reparations fantasy set on Madison Street on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Kondabolu wears a crown and stands up in a bicycle rickshaw, pointing "onward!" to his white-senator-looking driver. Both American and rainbow flags are visible in the background. The script is flipped, and it's a beautiful, sunny day in the USA. "I put up a Facebook question asking for a rickshaw driver, and I had three offers in an hour," he says in awe. "That's Seattle." The title refers to the year the US Census Bureau predicts white Americans will dwindle to 49 percent of the population. Kondabolu rejects this "news" by pointing out the figure has been clearly manufactured for white people who would ignorantly regard the other 51 percent as a unified front. "That only works if it's 49 percent white people, 51 percent you people," Kondabolu says. Of course, it also only works if the 49 percent group is homogenous as well, which is bogus.

Kondabolu's knack for criticizing entitled white folks tends to draw them nearer. You can imagine he's skewering Seattle on Waiting for 2042 with his joke about "white, liberal cowards" in the US who don't know how good they have it and should really STFU, claiming persecution and threatening to move to Canada: "Rush Limbaugh is an idiot, they put high fructose corn syrup in everything, and—my god—no one composts! They're killing us!" (Punch line: "That's not how the refugee system works.") "My crowd makeups are very diverse," he says, "and I pride myself on that. One thing I've heard from people who come to my shows in Seattle and Portland is that they never get to be in that mixed of a setting. And a lot of people who come to my shows aren't comedy fans. They just like me or they discovered comedy through me."

But it's not simply the content of Kondabolu's comedy that is right on—it's the funniness of the comedy as well. He practices constantly and is a student of standup as an art form, of timing and joke structure. That's important, because most activist art sucks: Ideology drives the car, and the entertainment gets run over. Kondabolu's precision-tooled delivery is inspired by the British comedian Stewart Lee—in performance, they'll both calmly track a multipart joke in real time, offering commentary about how well or poorly each punch line hits the crowd. As Kondabolu unpacks his material, he guesses aloud about which demographic is doing the laughing, and why the rest of the room isn't. This allows jokes to go on longer and get more laughs, and for Kondabolu to have a moment with his various constituencies. At first it's a little weird, like the first time Kevin Spacey breaks the fourth wall on House of Cards. It's seemingly a manifestation of self-consciousness, but then the deliberateness of it becomes apparent, and helpful when processing pain.

"I was doing my warm-ups in Seattle when the Trayvon verdict was announced," he says. "I had to go on an hour later. I did not want to. There were a lot of people who expected me to address it, and I was just angry. I wanted to yell. I ended up doing that. I found a way to make it into a joke, but before that I just ranted about Florida for a while. An elderly person told me he'd always remember me because I was the one who told him about the verdict."

Over the span of Waiting for 2042—an hour that feels like 30 minutes—you get into Kondabolu's rhythm. You realize his particular meta-joke style is a shrewd device that reminds us how two people's perceptions of a single event are always different. In dissecting his presentation, we can see the many audiences he considers, and it feels very humane and considerate. Kondabolu keeps us all in his head at once, at our varying levels of ignorance or awareness of the bigotry that surrounds us. And in Seattle, where groups and classes and ethnicities and arts scenes are like tide pools, we can laugh separately and together.