First Joaquin Phoenix, and now this: Kal Penn, the 31-year-old actor best known for his roles in the Harold and Kumar films and the TV series House, has taken what we hope will be a temporary retirement from acting to take a position as President Obama's associate director in the White House office of public liaison, which he describes as an outreach position in what is "basically the front door of the White House." A native of Montclair, New Jersey, the actor was born Kalpen Modi to Indian immigrants in 1977. (He uses the name "Kal Penn" professionally; according to Penn, he originally put the "Americanized" version of his name on his acting resume as an experiment to prove that it wouldn't make a difference to casting directors, then stuck with it when his callbacks instantly rose by fifty percent.) Although the official announcement of Penn's appointment wasn't made until yesterday, savvy House fans first sussed out that something was up on Monday night, when they tuned in to the latest episode and learned that Penn's character, Dr. Lawrence Kutner, had unceremoniously shot himself in the temple. It was a shocking tragedy, not least for special guest sick people Meat Loaf Aday and Colleen Camp, whose storyline had to be awkwardly sandwiched in between extended fits of grieving. It was only the next morning, when Penn broke the story to Entertainment Weekly, that it became clear that TV Land's loss was the White House's gain.

Penn campaigned for Obama in the 2008 campaign and served on his National Arts Policy Committee. More recently, he was one of the featured performers at the Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, where he and George Lopez delivered quotations from Dwight Eisenhower and Barbara Jordan. He has also taught a course in “Images of Asian Americans in the Media” at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, what might be most impressive about the appointment is that Obama wasn't scared off by Penn's stoner movie comedy past. (In addition to the Harold and Kumar movies, he first attracted major attention for his role in National Lampoon's Van Wilder, and starred in the sequel, The Rise of Taj. In a more dignified but possibly less entertaining vein, he also starred in Mira Nair's The Namesake, for which he received the Asian Excellence Award for Outstanding Actor, and appeared as one of Lex Luthor's henchmen in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns. In 2007, Penn also played a terrorist in four episodes of 24; about that role, he's said, "I have a huge political problem with the role. It was essentially accepting a form of racial profiling. I think it’s repulsive. But it was the first time I had a chance to blow stuff up and take a family hostage." The guy's gonna do just fine in Washington. In the meantime, fans needing closure can visit the online memorial to his character that Fox has set up.