Last month, the stand-up comic, TV presenter, and hopeful applicant to replace Trevor Noah as the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj, was exposed as a fabulist. In a New Yorker piece, which you should probably read before this, the writer details the embellishments, or wholesale fabrications, which have been at the centre of his two Netflix stand-up specials.
I won’t detail them again here, other than to say that while they conspicuously didn’t serve any joke, they did serve to present Minhaj as more oppressed, more tortured, more brave, more influential and more ingenious than he is. In one story, he said that his daughter was hospitalised after a suspicious powder, sent to his home in an envelope, was spilt on her.
Now if the fact-checking of a stand-up’s routine seems especially vexatious to you, a bad-faith denial of the art of joke-making and story-telling, then consider this: Minhaj’s stories were offered with the full intention of them being received as actual fact – and more, the reputation that he’s assiduously built rests upon a particular form of earnest and deeply personal “truth-telling”. The anthrax story wasn’t told for laughs, but to establish his moral status as a besieged man of colour. He’s speaking from the frontlines of bigotry and political defiance: the envelope was likely sent as retaliation for a TV spot he did on Saudi Arabia or Hindu nationalism under Narendra Modi.
There are different categories of artifice, and often – despite the high-mindedly muddled alibis of the fraudster’s defence – it’s quite easy to separate them. When the award-winning Australian writer John Hughes was exposed last year as an astonishingly craven and serial plagiarist, he initially defended himself by saying it was accidental. When further plagiarisms were revealed – whole sentences lifted without alteration or attribution – his public defence shifted to one in which he was engaged in a romantic, intertextual act of homage. It was, and remains, bullshit.
And so naturally, as occurs when artistic fraud is discovered, Minhaj invoked the noble – and infinitely elastic – license of the artist. Minhaj insistently told the journalist that he was interested in “emotional truth”. “The emotional truth is first,” he said. “The factual truth is secondary.”
When I watched his 2017 Netflix special, I had absolutely no doubt that the personal stories he shared were meant to be accepted as literally happening to him. And I have no doubt that the vast majority of those who saw it too accepted the same thing.
He is not early Steve Martin, whose schtick was coke-fuelled surrealism. He’s not Hunter S. Thompson, whose coke-fuelled gonzo exaggerations were accepted by the reader as just that. He’s an earnest political monologuist, who shares personal stories to make a larger point. “The reality is that some comics have more leeway toying with the truth than others,” The NY Times critic Jason Zinoman wrote last month. “All artists teach their audience how to view them, by the way they tell jokes, their style, the level of absurdity. What makes Hasan Minhaj such a troubling example is that his style, onstage and often off in interviews, suggested we should believe him.”
Here’s a pithier take from fellow comic Eli Yudin: “It’s weird to classify these as the ‘sort of lies every stand-up tells’. Those are like ‘a group of teens called me Winnie the Pooh at a Popeyes.’ I don’t do like a long emotional set about a fake dead mom, and I’d deservedly get some side eye if I did.”
And here’s Minhaj himself, in an interview with NBC about his 2022 Netflix special, The King’s Jester: “To me, great comedy is the art of confession. It’s the art of actually risking something. And I wanted to kind of confess it to the audience.”
Minhaj has vaingloriously offered himself, for years now, as a speaker of truth to power. The mission of his now-cancelled Netflix series The Patriot Act, not dissimilar to The Daily Show where he worked as a comedic correspondent, was formally described as: “explor[ing] the cultural and political landscape with depth and sincerity”.
What’s more, the stories he shared on-stage were also constantly shared with reporters as fact. These were not artful confections designed to birth revelatory “emotional truths”, but shit that he made up and wanted us to believe were literally true. About the hospitalisation of his daughter, Minhaj said this in an interview with the Daily Beast last year:
Ultimately, there were some pretty scary consequences for you and your family that stemmed from the comedy you were doing, and you talk about that in this very emotional way in the special. Was there a breaking point for you where you really had to re-examine what you were doing?
Yeah, when my family received that package, and I don’t know who sent it, and I was with my daughter. That was just a sobering wake-up call.
It was an envelope with some white powder that fortunately did not turn out to be anything dangerous.
Thankfully. So someone was trying to scare me or scare us. And it worked. It was really terrifying. There really is this thing where people talk about, “Oh, comedians need to push the envelope.” But I remember in that moment going, oh shit, sometimes the envelope pushes back.
There are consequences for what you say and do. And if it hurts the people that count on you the most, and someone who is so innocent like my daughter, I’ve really got to re-evaluate and examine what I’m doing here.
Hilariously, in that same interview, Minhaj speaks earnestly about collapsing contrived distinctions – between the celebrity guy on social media, and the dad at home – and said that his art would benefit from less artifice. He said:
I’m trying to close the gap between who I am on Instagram and who I am on iMessage. Best believe there’s Twitter Matt Wilstein and there’s iMessage Matt Wilstein. There’s Twitter Amanda Gorman and there’s iMessage Amanda Gorman. There’s Twitter Malala and there’s iMessage—or WhatsApp—Malala. And those are two different people. You’re lying to me if you don’t admit that, because I know that’s true with me. And if I’m going to be honest and pursue this thing called being an artist and devote my life to it, I’ve got to give you iMessage me. And iMessage means, this is who I really am, for real, for real. ‘What did you really think of Olivia Wilde’s movie, for real?’ That’s the iMessage me. That, to me, is true honesty, and that’s what I’m pursuing.
This interview, like the NBC one, was in the service of promoting The King’s Jester. Which brings us to the funniest thing that Hasan Minhaj has ever done: in a stand-up hour in which he “bravely” critiques his own self-satisfaction with fame, he also includes an entirely bogus story about FBI entrapment (and how he cleverly fooled them). Again, not for laughs, not as a dizzy riff, but as something that actually happened.
It’s peak chutzpah, the work of a fantasist who thought he was beyond discovery. He also seems the perfect embodiment of our time: An ambitious man clever enough to see the dollars in publicly “philosophising” about social media and authenticity, while weaving fabulous stories about himself.
For a decade now, in interview after interview, Minhaj returns to three themes: that he’s a scourge of global dictators, that he wants great and enduring success, and how much he cherishes sincerity. Of those three themes – vanity, ambition and sincerity – I can sense that the first two long ago overwhelmed the third.
It’s now curious to see how often, how insistently, Minhaj referred to the importance of “sincerity” and “authenticity” in regard to his work. It appears as frequently as the humble brags about the threats and danger he courts by speaking truth to power.
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From the New Yorker piece:
But was his invention of a traumatic experience with his child or with law-enforcement entrapment distasteful, given the moral heft of those things, and the fact that other people have actually experienced them? “It’s grounded in truth,” Minhaj said.
“But it didn’t happen to you,” I replied.
“I think what I’m ultimately trying to do is highlight all of those stories,” he said. “Building to what I think is a pointed argument.”
I find this nauseatingly glib and self-serving. And not least because I struggle personally with a trauma regarding my child, or that I’ve spoken with Indian journalists who have actually lived the consequences of reporting critically on Modi.
I have no doubt that Minhaj is neither as bright or sincere as the public image that he – and a small industry of writers and publicists – have cultivated. Not that I ever found him clever or funny, but rather dull, mawkish, suspiciously slick and a smugly prolific espouser of liberal platitudes.
He's another opportunist, with no intellectual heft. His gift was reading the zeitgeist, sniffing the winds. With little wit, but great ambition, he could transform stand-up sets into profitable TED Talks. An upper middle-class man who saw an opportunity to become famous for exaggerating his victimhood. And not only exaggerating his victimhood, but, quite pathetically, exaggerating his moral courage and personal influence.
But Hasan Minhaj is merely one beneficiary of a system that incentivises confessional victimhood. A market that trades on the gullibility and moral vanity of white progressives. There are others. “He tonally presents himself as a person who was always taking down the despots and dictators of the world and always speaking truth to power,” a former TV colleague of Minhaj’s told The New Yorker. “That’s grating.”
It's more than grating.