Kumar goes to Washington?

Kal Penn, whose character smoked dope with a Dubya impersonator in "Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay," has been hired by the Obama administration to be a liaison between the White House and arts groups. No kidding. ... Read here.

I wonder if his new bosses saw the above clip from "HK2?" I'm guessing it wasn't one of Penn's work samples.

Now, I've interviewed Penn a couple times and let's just say that his roles -- with the exception of perhaps "House" -- don't represent him well. At all. He's super-smart. He was reading The New York Times when I met him. (Right side up and everything.) And he studied international security at Stanford while acting, according to HK2 bio. In other words, the dude's not Kumar.

On a Shreveport set in February 2007, Penn told me: "I will say to that dude who hasn’t met me, he’s going to be sorely disappointed. I’m a pretty boring guy. If you hang out all day [on set], you’ll see me drinking water, sitting there reading the newspaper, and then doing my job when I have to do it. That’s it. There’s this weird assumption that I’m some sort of dancing monkey just because I play the role of Kumar, which is sort of flattering because it means you’ve done a believable job in playing the character. But fans are regularly disappointed."

But really, now, what do I think of Penn working for the White House? Um, well ... hmm. I'll quote Dubya as played by James Adomian in "HK2": "You just blew my f***ing mind."