As fans of “House” already know, Dr. Lawrence Kutner is dead. To the show’s credit, his suicide was handled about as well, and as realistically, as it could be. Instead of giving us one of those melodramatic TV suicides (you know, lots of foreshadowing, staring into the mirror, shots ringing out just before his friends rush in to save him), this seemingly came out of nowhere. Kutner’s friends and family were going about their lives when, not even halfway into the episode, he turned up dead.

This came as a shock, not just because Kutner was the show’s most consistently happy character, but because he was a fan favorite. After all, he was played by Kal Penn. The kids love him! So why would they not just write him off the show, but actually kill his character? This isn’t Lost! I was sure something else had to be going on.

And it was. Penn explained his reason for leaving the show in an interview with Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello:

I was incredibly honored a couple of months ago to get the opportunity to go work in the White House. I got to know the President and some of the staff during the campaign and had expressed interest in working there, so I’m going to be the associate director in the White House office of public liaison. They do outreach with the American public and with different organizations. They’re basically the front door of the White House. They take out all of the red tape that falls between the general public and the White House. It’s similar to what I was doing on the campaign.

Well. That’s a pretty good reason to quit a TV show. And here I thought he was just gonna do movies or something.

He admitted in the interview that he would be taking a pay cut at his new job, and although he isn’t retiring from acting, he is giving it up for the time being. And he’s doing it because he has a sincere passion for politics. Cynical as I am, I have to admire that. I follow politics, and sometimes engage in idle daydreaming about what I would say to this or that politician, but I’ve never even taken the time to volunteer. Kal Penn worked with the Obama campaign, and now he’s working with the administration in a job that I couldn’t explain if I wanted to. Honestly, I have no idea what the associate director of the White House office of public liaison does (I intend to look it up as soon as I’m done writing this, but for now I want to remain pure). If I had to guess, I’d say he was going to be some sort of mascot, but that wouldn’t be very nice of me.

Implied in all of this is the idea that Penn must have really impressed the Obama people during the campaign. Lots of actors volunteer on political campaigns, but it’s not often that one of them gets offered a job in a Presidential administration, so he must have some idea of what he’s doing. Pundits love to complain about actors getting involved in politics, claiming they’re attaching their names to trendy causes without really understanding without really understanding the intricacies and compromises of political life. I hope to be there when those pundits get proven wrong this time, giving another reason to admire Kal Penn.

Now that I’ve got all the admiration out of the way, let me get cynical for a moment. This is a great career move, not just for Kal Penn the politician or Kal Penn the activist, but for Kal Penn the actor as well.

Consider Al Franken: he was an SNL alumnus, a comedian, and a political commentator. He wrote a very funny book about Rush Limbaugh in 1996, but political humor doesn’t always age well, and many of the book’s jokes became dated within a few years. By the early 21st century, he was working at Air America and writing the occasional book — a respectable career, but perhaps lacking the glamour of some of his earlier work. And then he pissed off Bill O’Reilly. That’s not hard to do, but O’Reilly became singularly obsessed with Franken – everything Franken said was treated as an attack on O’Reilly, and everything he did was seen as proof of a vast left-wing conspiracy. O’Reilly’s minions spread the meme, his fellow Fox News pundits repeated it, and before long they had turned a fading comedian into the poster boy for the Evils of Liberalism. Franken’s books sold millions of copies, his story became evidence of conservatism’s misplaced priorities, and now he’s (more or less) a United States Senator.

That’s not bad for the guy who played Stuart Smalley, and it would be pretty good for the guy who played Kumar. If any conservative pundits are reading this, please, by all means, criticize Penn’s latest career move. Search for sinister motives in any acting roles he takes on in the future. Talk about him like he’s single-handedly responsible for destroying the American way of life.

I look forward to voting for him.