Hasan Minhaj Told the Stories We Wanted Him to Tell
We demanded bullshit, and we got it
Last week, The New Yorker reported that comedian Hasan Minhaj made up several stories that he tells in his standup. Minhaj lied about an FBI agent infiltrating his childhood mosque, lied about being mailed white powder that he accidentally spilled on his baby daughter, and lied about a girl refusing to go to prom with him because her family was racist. He defended these fabrications (and others) as “emotional truths”, a phrase that instantly earned a spot the Celebrity Euphemism Hall of Fame, alongside “conscious uncoupling”, “wardrobe malfunction”, and “checked into a spa for exhaustion.”
Now, obviously: Bullshit is to standup what coconut milk is to Thai food. That ingredient in pretty much everything. When a standup says “this happened to me,” that means “this happened to me, or a friend, or someone guy on Twitter, or some guy a friend says he saw on Twitter.” If the comic says “this happened recently”, that means “any time in the post-World War II era.” Stories get condensed, details get embellished, and in my experience, the audience doesn’t really care. After all: They didn’t come to fact check your set. They came because the club gave their friend a 40-second spot during check drop on the condition that they bring 70 friends.
But Minhaj’s falsehoods seem qualitatively different to me. I have a rule about how much bullshit is too much bullshit for my set: The thing that I'm talking about needs to have happened or be something that would be unremarkable if it did happen. So, for example: “I ordered a pizza and the delivery guy was stoned” would be in-bounds. But “I ordered a pizza and the delivery guy was Paul McCartney wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Born 2 Fingerblast’” would be out-of-bounds. Because comedy becomes pointless when it’s just a contest to see who can make up the craziest thing.
Minhaj’s stories work specifically because they’re remarkable. And there’s another common element to his falsehoods: They all typify what many highly educated liberals assume the Muslim experience in America to be. His stories are so perfectly calibrated to narratives about white supremacy and post-9/11 overreaction that play well with liberals that they’re practically out of a sitcom. A bad sitcom. One of those self-important sitcoms that gets tagged as “comedy” and makes you think “in what fucking universe is this joke-free misery-gasm a comedy?”1
I assume that Minhaj made up stories for the same reason that James Frey, Stephen Glass, and Margaret B. Jones made up stories: for career advancement. Succeeding in a creative field is hard, and making shit up is a shortcut. The fault, obviously, lies with Minhaj. But I think there’s also something to be said about the environment in entertainment that pressures non-white writers and performers to live the experiences we expect them to live and have the views that we expect them to have. In the name of racial justice, we’ve embraced some race-essentialist ideas that I think are limiting and fucked-up. Though well intentioned, these ideas dehumanize non-white writers and performers and push them to become faceless avatars for their race.
Let’s start with the well-intentioned part: Entertainment used to be much, much whiter than the U.S. population. At some point — possibly during a writing session for The Jeffersons — someone looked around and said “Hey…is it weird that we’re all white?”2 This led to the diversity push that has become a major factor in entertainment, and which will continue to be a major factor in entertainment until production companies lose a gigantic anti-discrimination lawsuit five or ten years from now.
The primary logic behind this push is that entertainment needs more diverse perspectives, i.e. non-white ones. As I’ve written before: I think this logic has some merit. It was weird how white TV and movies used to be; it would be fucked up if entertainment was still a herd of white people plus whoever got picked as the modern equivalent of Sammy Davis Junior (probably Wayne Brady). As much as I bang on about the value of merit and the importance of hiring the person who can do the job best, I can’t say that if I was a producer, I’d be blind to things like race, gender, and sexual orientation. I’d want to be blind to those things — that would be Plan A — but if I wound up with a slate of shows that have the same demographics as the National Hockey League, I’d think “something’s wrong here” and make changes.
That being said: I think focusing on race is dangerous. In my experience, fixating on race almost always morphs into racism, and I’m not sure that I needed to use the word “almost” just then. I’m not comfortable organizing my thinking around racial categories that only exist because past racists divided society along those lines. I think that an over-focus on race frequently turns into race essentialism, and I think this is basically what happened with the idea that one or a few people can capture the “perspective” of an entire race.
Consider how this logic gets applied in the real world. Suppose that The Jeffersons’ showrunner decides that the writers’ room is too white and adds a black writer — I think I've made it clear that I think this would be a not-unreasonable thing to do. But what, exactly, would that writer's role be when it comes to race? Are they supposed to speak for all of black America? Are they supposed to be some sort of realism filter despite the fact that ‘70s sitcoms had about the same level of realism as a Mother Goose rhyme? Is it relevant that the writer almost certainly didn't start out with a racist neighbor in Queens and then move on up to the East Side after striking it rich in the cutthroat world of New York dry cleaning? I don’t want to be too cynical here; I could imagine a black writer pitching stories that wouldn’t have occurred to most white writers, or flagging things that feel tone-deaf. But I do want to be appropriately cynical, because after all: None of us are our race, all of us are shaped by experiences that can’t be assumed, and the extent that any one person's perspective can be a stand-in for the collective experiences of a large group of people is extremely limited.
Multiple non-white writer friends have told me that they’ve felt pigeonholed. More than one has told me of a manager or producer urging them to “write their story”, which is code for “if you’ve got some sob story that ideally involves a bunch of racism, then let’s ride that trauma all the way to the bank.” I’ve seen things get very stupid; one black writer I know was assumed to have some special insight to the situation in Ferguson, Missouri following the Michael Brown shooting. This writer is a college-educated guy from a middle class family in California; his last job before working in TV was in the tech sector. If asking a Silicon Valley nerd to channel the experience of living in a high-poverty suburb of St. Louis just because that nerd happens to be black isn't racist, then I don't know what is.
Nonetheless: If a writer can claim to offer a certain perspective, then that’s a selling point. Some writers embrace this angle; they make race (or gender, or sexual orientation) their calling card. Are these writers leaning into their identity to further their careers, or are they doing it because their (often white) bosses expect it? Yes. Yes to both of those. Except no, neither…who knows? It depends on the writer, and I'll bet that the writer themselves often doesn't fully know their motivations. Probably the only reason why any writer ever pitches anything is “because they thought it might get used”, which is another way to say “that's the job”, which could also be phrased as “if none of their pitches get used, then pretty soon they'll get shit-canned and be back to teaching improv in prisons.”
Hasan Minhaj’s big break was as a correspondent on The Daily Show. The Daily Show is one of the most identity-aware shows there is. That makes sense; it’s a political show, and race and gender loom large in our politics. The show also went through a high-profile incident in 2010 in which they caught heat for being too male and too white. Minhaj was hired in 2014 on the strength of an audition in which he satirized Bill Maher’s recent (at the time) argument with Ben Affleck about Islam. His appearances on the show were frequently about Islam. His White House Correspondents Dinner speech was largely about Islam. I don't think I'm assuming too much to surmise that The Daily Show wanted Minhaj to talk about Islam from a personal perspective. After all, if they didn't want that, then what's the point of all the “value of diverse perspectives” stuff in the first place?
Minhaj also cut his teeth in the New York standup scene,3 which is another space that focuses heavily on identity. Standup, generally, is identity-obsessed largely because producers and agents want to know how to market you. You need an angle; that's why you see comics leaning heavily into their ethnicity or adopting obviously affected stage personas in an attempt to stand out. And standup in New York is heavily populated by hipster liberals who make the typical NPR host seem like an MMA fighter. Those people love identity-based standup, and they love stories about how racist other people are. Minhaj probably gravitated towards identity-based stuff because that's what worked. Ultimately, every comic does whatever material works; that's why road comics do broad jokes that work anywhere, alternative comics do quirky stuff that young people like, and Vegas comics speak loudly and use small words so that they can be understood by audience members who — by some metrics — died several years ago.
Which is to say: Minhaj was in an environment that highly valued identity-based content. He obviously learned that he could make a name as “the Muslim, Indian guy”, and he learned that tales of racism played well with his Daily Show-fan audience. How did he then make the leap to large-scale fabrication? We obviously don't know, but former New Republic columnist Stephen Glass — who perpetrated one of the worst frauds in journalism history — described his entrée to fabrication this way:
“I remember thinking, ‘If I just had the exact quote that I wanted to make it work, it would be perfect.’ And I wrote something on my computer, and then I looked at it, and I let it stand.”
“It would be perfect.” Yes: The perfect detail, the perfect flourish can make a story. And the stories that worked best for Minhaj were ones that fit the narrow niche that defined his persona. Apparently, not enough of those stories happened to him in real life, so he made some up. Now that he's been busted, he probably won't tell bullshit tales that perfectly fit liberal perceptions of what someone with his demographic background should think and feel. But there's a market for that stuff, so someone else will.
Whenever I mention self-important, joke-free “comedy” shows, I like to link to this SNL sketch, which parodied that phenomenon perfectly.
I don’t know how many of The Jeffersons writers were white, and at least one — Michael G. Moye — was black. But the show was created and developed by four white guys, and from what I can find about the writers, they seem to be mostly white.
Minhaj was actually in LA for a few years before moving to New York, but much of his standup was developed in New York.
Good piece. I think about the differences between Minaj and Russell Peters, who has a very different delivery but tells jokes that are mostly targeted to other immigrants/children of immigrants. “It’s true! We are like that! Haha “
as opposed to Minaj who tells “jokes” for white liberals so they can stroke their chin and in a somber, reflective way “it’s true. We are like that”
Great post. Harping on identity reminds me of the immortal words of producer Jack Lipnick:
“The important thing is we all want [your screenplay] to have that Barton Fink feeling. We all have that feeling but since you're Barton Fink, I'm assuming you have it in spades.”