The Hasan Minhaj Saga and Evolving Expectations of Truth in Comedy
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. In September, The New Yorker published an article by Claire Malone titled Hassan Minhaj's Emotional Truths. Fact-checking moments from the comedian's stand-up specials. For instance, Minhaj has an extended bit about being rejected on prom night on his date's doorstep. Mrs. Reid opens the door. She has this look of concern on her face. And she's like, oh my God, honey, it...

Did Bethany not tell you? Oh sweetie, we love you. We think you're great and we love that you come over and study. But you know, tonight's one of those nights where, you know, we have a lot of family back home in Nebraska and we're gonna be taking a lot of photos tonight. So we don't think it'd be a good fit.

The New Yorker found that the doorstep moment itself never happened, and Menhaj owned up to it in a 21-minute response video with qualifications posted on YouTube several weeks ago. Bethany's mom did really say that. It was just a few days before prom.

And I created the doorstep scene to drop the audience into the feeling of that moment. In another routine, Minhaj describes receiving an envelope filled with white powder in the mail after critical Patriot Act segments on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalism. He says the powder fell onto his daughter's stroller. And it falls on my daughter's shoulder, her neck, her cheeks. And she's staring at me. We rushed down to NYU.

And the moment they see the baby, they just rip the clothes off her and they take her away. But the New Yorker found no record of this emergency room visit. Minhaj admits that it didn't happen, though he says he did open an envelope full of white powder while with his daughter, and the threats to his family's safety were genuine. This is all terrifying, so why embellish? Why even say you took your daughter to the hospital the night of the anthrax?

Bina and I, we got into a huge argument and she kept asking, "Hasan, what if this powder fell on our daughter?"

So I created the hospital scene to put the audience in that same shock and fear that me and Bina felt playing out that night. The New Yorker has stood behind its story, even after Minhaj called it misleading. The scandal, which has been covered by almost every major news outlet, brings into question what audiences expect from comedians, especially ones who do Jon Stewart-like political commentary. I thought,

I had two different expectations built into my work. My work as a storytelling comedian and my work as a political comedian, where facts always come first. That is why the fact checking on Patriot Act was extremely rigorous. But in my work as a storytelling comedian,

I assumed that the lines between truth and fiction were allowed to be a bit more blurry. Jesse David Fox is a senior editor at Vulture, host of Good One, a podcast about jokes, and the author of Comedy Book, How Comedy Conquered Culture and the Magic That Makes It Work.

Welcome to the show, Jesse. Oh, thank you so much for having me. So it's pretty commonplace for comedians to exaggerate or twist the truth for the sake of a more entertaining story in their stand-up performances. What do you think the New Yorker article and the reactions to it tell us about the perceptions of truth in comedy in 2023? Yeah.

The tension of the story is that a comedian would exaggerate and that might be a newsworthy bit of information. And that implies that there is a large segment of the general audience who consumes comedy who does not think of a comedian as a person with the...

the artistic license to make things up. I think there is a tendency to think of comedians as just talking up there. And even while comedy has gotten more and more ambitious in its structure, there still is a sort of tendency to not really investigate the nature of how they're talking. As you yourself wrote, you know, no one is going to question whether what Mike Birbiglia says about his life is true. But when you are centering yourself in a story about comedy

racial discrimination, pain that you experienced, and then you exaggerate it, you embroider it to make the prejudice seem even more egregious. Isn't that precisely the occasion when the contract with the comedy audience shifts and genuine naked honesty is called for?

Hassan, in his defense, is arguing that what he's conveying to the audience is correct. But...

In so much as an artist is trying to communicate their truth to people, if them knowing the factual truth would completely delegitimize the story, then I do think there's something to think about. I think it's also impacted by the fact that Hassan is a comedian whose other job is sort of being in the political space. And this show is not an apolitical work. It is a sort of political work with a point it is making.

You know, we're hearing a story that's horrible, made more horrible so that we can feel more horrible about it. I don't know. It feels weird at minimum. It feels weird. We never really as a society determined the ethics of art, but our stomach can feel like, oh, this is not what we agreed to. I think broken contract is correct.

In your book, you track audiences' evolving expectations of truth and authenticity in comedy. You mark the sick comedians of the mid-20th century as turning points in the role of truth in comedy. I mean, Mort Sahl used to take newspapers up onto the stage. And obviously, there were plenty of moments in Lenny Bruce's monologues that weren't funny.

Talk to me about the sick comedians and how they engendered the goodwill and regard of their audiences. They were reacting to the comedy of the 1940s and early 1950s that was still rooted in very traditional joke writing structure and club comedians performing sometimes stock material and not coming from a personal perspective. And

In the late 1950s, with the rise of what would become called the sick comedians, Lenny Bruce, Mart Sol, Shelley Berman, all had certain versions of

This is a personal expression. And that is a tremendous evolution, probably the largest evolution in the history of comedy. And from personal expression, you assume they're sort of a truthful expression. Let's talk just, say, 10, 20 years after the sick comedians about Richard Pryor, say, and George Carlin, who became experts at performing their authentic personas while highlighting social inequities.

Richard Pryor is, to me, the avatar in a lot of different definitions of what we think of in terms of truth and comedy, because he's both being really frank about race relations in America in a way that comedians weren't doing in the same way.

But then there is this sort of truth of how he investigated himself in a way that really had never been seen. That level of vulnerability really pushed the art form forward. By being so vulnerable, by being so truthful seemingly in his discussion of his personal life, that then gives you a certain credibility when you're talking about politics or race. Talk about vulnerability. Yeah.

You wrote about Tig Notaro going on stage just after the death of her mother and her own cancer diagnosis. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer. How are you? It's a good time. Diagnosed with cancer.

And then you talked about Margaret Cho's struggles on her TV show to try to conform to how TV execs expected her to look, or Maria Bamford doing material about mental health in the 2000s. I went into a psychiatric facility, which if you haven't been, don't feel bad if you go, and they're uniformly awful. You're not at the wrong one. They're all bad. They're all bad.

It's as if an art director came in and said, okay, I want to break five more chairs. These women, you wrote, confront the popular idea of what it means to be fearless on stage. Fearless is often used to describe comics unafraid of hurting people, when it should apply to comedians afraid of being hurt by people and persisting anyway.

What all those comedians did is genuinely risk ramifications. You know, if you just come down from on high and go, here is my truth, it's unquestioned, this is the truth, it's not actually vulnerable. You're not actually going to get to something universal. But if you leave yourself open to the audience, you're going to be able to find something deeper. Actually sort of being a pervert and maybe having a string of sexual misconduct has a long history of not actually affecting one's career, where...

Physical illness, a history of mental illness, does have a long history of affecting people's careers, especially in a place like Hollywood that is looking for reasons not to work with people. And that is the difference, which is not just saying this is the truth. It's unquestioned. It's basically being like truth is a sometimes abstract idea that we're going to find together. So let's talk about Louis C.K. Okay.

You wrote that he had a breakthrough after his first kid was born that transformed his, up to that point, not very impressive career. You write that in the story of comedy's march to be taken more seriously, C.K. was for nearly a decade its avatar. And at the center of the celebration was truth, that the Los Angeles Review of Books called him television's most honest man. You know, it's really sad about men, right?

That we can't a beautiful thought about a woman that isn't followed by a disgusting thought about that same woman. We're not capable of it. We can't do one without the other.

Louis C.K. was taken extremely seriously in a way comedians really hadn't been before. And there's a lot of reasons for it. But a lot of it was sort of this idea of how honest he was on stage. And sometimes he thought his daughter was a real a-hole. Yes, yes. Stuff like that. Or...

describing what it's like to clean the diaper of his newborn daughter and confronting that expectation. And I do think talking about parenting on stage, that was new. But he then sort of used the goodwill of that to then apply it to a lot of work that was not as emotionally vulnerable, which was much more using the feeling of truth to sort of heighten the stakes of jokes and

And then sort of using that truth to then get away with material that if you look back on was not actually sophisticated in its taking on language or race, but actually sort of quite reductive. I think you need to give an example. It's a little abstract.

Sure. One is a joke about how he prefers to say the N-word, actually say the word, not say the phrase, the N-word. He has a joke about the C-word and how that word is okay. And he has a joke about the F-slur and about how that word is okay. And in those jokes, he fashions them as progressive. And

And all of those were sort of attempts to use the goodwill he had earned from earlier specials to sort of get away with stuff that I think really is not as truthful as he is fashioning himself to be. Then in 2017, the New York Times published a story revealing five accusations of sexual misconduct against him. What does his story reveal about the expectations of truth in comedy?

For a lot of younger people, I think it poisoned the well of sort of projecting yourself as authentic when you have full control of how you're being presented. And I think for a lot of young people, it made their certain amount of distrust to people that are fashioning themselves as true tellers. And I think more than anything about being truthful, it's much more about control and controlling the narrative and controlling the perception. So you can say, yes, he was being honest, but

But more so, he was trying to manipulate the perception of that honesty in a way where he was still in power and he was still in control and he was not being vulnerable to people calling into question sort of his ethics or sort of his behavior.

You've marked the appearance of a new era of comedian. Folks like John Early and Kate Berlant respond to this performed authenticity, reacting, you say, against the phoniness of going on stage and acting like what you're saying is authentic. I'm just going to stop you right there because... What's up? Oh, my God. I mean, Kate, this is...

This is huge. This is huge. -No, thank you, thank you, thank you. I have chills. I have chills. -Oh, my God, yeah. -So few people experience this. -Thank you. I know. I mean, if I could go back in time to when we first met, and if I could tell those two people -- If I could tell those two people, "Kate, look how far you're gonna come." -Okay, don't -- don't go there, 'cause I'll go here. Okay? -Okay, but, Kate, I just want to say,

They satirize the idea that it's even possible to be truthful on stage. Is this the way to avoid being called inauthentic, to lean into the absurdity of the performance?

Yeah, I think so. It's a reaction against a lot of the sort of previous definition of what authenticity looks like. And it's saying that if you're going on stage and you're performing no matter what, it is more authentic to acknowledge you're performing than it is to pretend you are just telling people about your life. Kate's background, I believe she has a master's in performance studies.

It's rooted in people like Judith Butler. Judith Butler is a queer and feminist academic. A lot of what we think of is the idea of like the performance of gender comes from their work. They have a book called Gender Trouble. And the quote I quote from Gender Trouble is, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived. Meaning that you laugh when you realize we think we're being an authentic person, where really we are performing what we think an authentic person looks like.

And that then gets heightened on stage where you actually are performing. Minhaj is often vulnerable on stage, sharing stories about race in America and the discrimination he experienced. The narrative around his success is about what he reveals about the American immigrant experience and racism in the country.

He's admitted that he's not great at physical comedy or writing jokes. What he's great at is sincerity. Yeah, and I've talked to him about it. What he can do that may be better than any other comedian ever is look directly into a camera and say something funny.

I think is maybe a better word. And without irony, truly just directly being like, this is something that happened. This is important. So that can be quite impactful and can cause people to have a very strong relationship to him because he's talking directly to you. A lot of comedians aren't doing that, especially not on tape, because it's embarrassing almost.

to be seen as that sincere. Do you think that's his vulnerability? I think it's artistically vulnerable. I do think it is something that he knows comedians would make fun of. I think there is less vulnerability in the nature of how he tells his story. It's because he really isn't like Margaret Cho or the women that we talked about earlier, laying things on the line that could hurt them. This kind of earnest...

righteous discussion is in fact his brand. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that criticism of his work existed before the New Yorker story. So that's why when the New Yorker story came out, for a lot of people, they felt very vindicated because they're like, well, I always thought there was something wrong with his work. It's been reported that the New Yorker piece may have cost Minhaj, The Daily Show host's job.

But outside of that, do you think it might mark a new turn in the notion of truth in comedy?

It will force the comedians who are in the political sphere, whose personal work might not be the same thing, to really have to scrutinize their stand-up and see if it adheres to the same standards as their shows that hire fact-checkers and stuff like that. It might make the comedian have to do a little bit more work in really conveying that it's true. But what I hope...

is somewhere it allows audiences to sort of be where I am, where I don't go into a comedy show worried one way or the other about the sort of factual accuracy of the story and just allow myself to sort of experience it emotionally. So without Minhaj's host, The Daily Show continues with a rotating slew of guest hosts. Conan O'Brien retired. Shows like Patriot Act,

and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Desus and Miro and Z-Way have been canceled by their networks. It feels like a moment of change for the Stewart brand of political comedy. But what do you think is next? What's it feel like? What platform is it on?

Yeah, I think platform is the right word. The legacy of The Daily Show, of people turning to comedic individuals that they trust to provide them information and or process information in the news and politics is alive and well. Like if you look at podcasts, TikTok, on Instagram, there are just people doing this. It's essentially as our life gets increasingly complicated and we get further removed from each other.

Comedians are adept at affirming humanity. Comedians are adept at relieving tensions. Comedians are adept at making the world seem like it makes sense. Not necessarily fixing problems, but just making it seem like it's manageable. And if you find someone funny, you trust them. Studies show this. It's part of the nature of what we laugh at. It's so rooted in our trusting of other people. It's why we laugh most with our loved ones.

I mean, that's the thing about the Hassan story that I think is so interesting is after he released the video,

You then basically saw a split where who people trusted is who they decided was correct in that story. They both seemingly released examples of manipulation, right? The New Yorker story was about how Hassan manipulated the truth. Then Hassan released a video about how New Yorker manipulated the truth. And then people just picked a side. And that is the media story of this. Where everyone landed is not based on any actual information. It's just based on who they trust.

Thank you very much, Jesse. Thank you. Jesse David Fox is the author of Comedy Book, How Comedy Conquered Culture and the Magic That Makes It Work. Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. Tune in to The Big Show on Friday to hear all about how The New York Times went from fading newspaper to tech titan. In the meantime, consider leaving OTM a review on Apple Podcasts or your app of choice. It helps more people find us.