[The New Yorker tried to pin the comedian down with facts. It
didn’t work.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT THE HASAN MINHAJ CONTROVERSY SAYS ABOUT THE TROUBLE WITH
STORYTELLING  
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Aja Romano
November 10, 2023
Vox
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_ The New Yorker tried to pin the comedian down with facts. It
didn’t work. _

Hasan Minhaj at the 2023 ESPYS on July 12, 2023, in Los Angeles,
California. , Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images

 

Aja Romano [[link removed]] writes about pop
culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a
staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics
Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet,
and the culture wars.

_____

Rarely have public scandals been as confused or confusing as the one
that caused comedian and former _Patriot Act_ host Hasan Minhaj to
lose the _Daily Show_ anchor job. It all started with a New Yorker
story — an unexpected exposé from writer Clare Malone on Minhaj’s
loose relationship with the truth. In a controversial piece
[[link removed]] from
September, Malone presented evidence that Minhaj had embellished
details in his standup, specifically details related to his experience
of anti-Muslim discrimination in America after 9/11.

Malone’s article raised questions about the role of truth in comedy,
and comedy in journalism, but the main takeaway for most seemed to be
about Minhaj. There was a sense that these fabrications made him an
unreliable narrator as well as an opportunist — someone who faked
incidents of racism for the purpose of advancing his career. One
writer subsequently described
[[link removed]] what
Minhaj had done as “oppression fantasy” that “delegitimizes real
stuff via elite capture.”

Minhaj admitted to Malone on the record that, yes, he did such
embellishing, but the stories he told still contained “emotional
truth.” Still, the subsequent backlash was enough to reportedly
remove
[[link removed]] Minhaj
as the frontrunner to succeed Trevor Noah on _The_ _Daily Show_. The
job would have been a coup for Minhaj, who first came to prominence as
a _Daily Show_ correspondent before creating two standup specials
centered around his experience as an Indian Muslim American. He also
co-created and hosted the subsequent Netflix
[[link removed]] comedy news series, _Patriot Act_,
which would have put him in a good position to step into Noah’s
role.

In the aftermath, Minhaj released a statement in which he chose to
defend his fabrications instead of denying them. A 20-minute video
[[link removed]] posted to YouTube
[[link removed]] a month after the article came out went
further, with Minhaj himself asking, “Is Hasan Minhaj just a con
artist who uses fake racism and Islamophobia to advance his career?”
He went on to make a case that instead, he was making “artistic
choices to drive home larger issues affecting me and my community.”
He called Malone’s framing “needlessly misleading,” and
reiterated that most of the things she cited as embellished lies
actually happened to him and his family. The exaggerations, however,
are head-turning; one of the stories involves Minaj opening a letter
with white powder which spilled onto his young child, who was then
rushed to the hospital. Minhaj says he _did_ receive a letter filled
with white powder, but this is the only part of the story that’s
true.

Slate has done a thorough rundown
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all the specific instances and allegations Malone made as well as
Minhaj’s responses to each, and for the most part, it shows us just
how complicated “the truth” can be, both in comedy and journalism.
To pick just one OTHER example: In her article, Malone implies that
Minhaj completely made up the show-framing story of his 2017 Netflix
special, _Homecoming King_, in which he claimed a female friend from
high school dumped him on prom night due to her parents’ racism. In
his rebuttal video, Minhaj insists that the acceptance and subsequent
rejection really happened, and the woman’s parents did make the
racist statements to him that he relates in the comedy special — it
just happened a few days _before_ prom. He condensed the events to
“drop the audience into the feeling of that moment,” Minhaj
states. He then goes on to produce evidence backing up his claims that
this woman was aware that racism was a factor in their not going to
prom together, evidence which further indicates that Malone explicitly
chose not to include these facts in her article, instead writing that
Minhaj and his former friend “had long carried different
understandings of her rejection.”

And this is how it goes for most of the incidents Malone mentions.
Again, Minhaj admits to all of them; he just explains them
differently, and with added context.

So now the question we’re left with is two-fold: Is Minhaj’s
explanation enough to get him off the hook — or should he have ever
been on the hook to begin with? The answers seem to lie in our
understanding of storytelling, and in the expectations we have of
specific comedic genres. What is it, after all, that we expect from
comedy, from journalism, from comedic journalism, and from journalism
about comedy?

Minhaj argues storytelling has always included embellishment. Does
that matter?

One of the reasons this whole controversy might feel strange is that
there seems to be a basic imbalance in terms of actions and
consequences. At the time of publication, Minhaj was a reported
frontrunner for the _Daily Show_ job, yes — but he was mainly a
standup comedian whose last show was canceled back in 2020. Now, it
seems that job is off the table
[[link removed]],
thanks to an extended feature in one of America’s most venerated
magazines. In her piece, Malone insists that the costs of Minhaj’s
fabrication are high, not for him, but for the Muslim American and
Indian American communities he represents. But, if you believe
Minhaj’s defense, amplifying a relatively minor disagreement about
details in storytelling by giving it an earthshaking mic drop in the
New Yorker inflates the seriousness of Minhaj’s actions while
yielding a potentially unfair outcome for Minhaj himself.

Malone catalogs Minhaj’s sins as falling into “the slipperiness of
memoir.” But there’s a major difference between a fabricated
memoir and Minhaj’s standup work. The most scandalous falsified
memoirs are often either entirely fabricated or hinge on a fabricated
premise, linking their authors to a false or overly idealized version
of themselves, from James Frey’s nonexistent drug rampages
[[link removed]] to
Margaret B. Jones’s entirely fake impoverished childhood
[[link removed]] or Misha
Defonseca
[[link removed]]’s
completely made-up Jewish Holocaust survivor identity (with a bonus
claim that she was adopted and raised by wolves).

And not just memoirists: Again and again, long-con hoaxsters have
fabricated the core of their identities, from fake Saudi
prince Anthony Gignac
[[link removed]] or
fake cancer survivor turned fake British guy Nicholas Alahverdian
[[link removed]] to
fake 9/11 survivor Tania Head
[[link removed]] or
fake Indigenous hero Buffy Sainte-Marie
[[link removed]]. The
New Yorker even ascribed a mythical quality to such fakers in
2018, noting
[[link removed]] they
were “shady, audacious” characters who “exist on a spectrum from
folk hero to disgrace.” In all of these examples, the audacity of
the lie is the core of the grift.

But Minhaj isn’t a fake. He isn’t lying about his core identity;
he is who he says he is. And he freely admitted to Malone that he
embellished aspects of the anecdotes she accused him of faking. When
he fabricates some details of a story, it isn’t to completely con
the public about who he is and what he’s experienced, but rather to
enhance the audience’s understanding — as he put it to Malone,
“to ‘make it feel the way it felt.’”

Minhaj is also, it has to be noted, a comedian — the central point
of that art form being to make people laugh, not to inform them, with
elision and overstatement being common tricks of the trade. Press any
standup on if their last joke truly “happened on the way over
here,” as so often claimed, and you’re likely to get a resounding
no. As Minhaj further explained
[[link removed]] to
Vanity Fair, “I use the tools of stand-up comedy — hyperbole,
changing names and locations, and compressing timelines to tell
entertaining stories. That’s inherent to the art form. You
wouldn’t go to a haunted house and say, ‘Why are these people
lying to me?’ — the point is the ride. Stand-up is the same.”

Minhaj isn’t alone here. The embellished personal anecdote is a
mainstay, nay, the ancient hallowed core, of not just the comic but
the storyteller — from the campfire-sitter’s ghost story to the
fisherman’s “one that got away.” Malone glosses over one
comedian’s observation that “most comics’ acts wouldn’t pass a
rigorous fact-check.” Even comedians who roundly criticized Minhaj
after reading Malone’s piece frequently inserted caveats. “We all
exaggerate and edit stories for the stage,” said comic Jeremy
McLellan in a post on X
[[link removed]] that
then went on to call Minhaj “psychotic” based on Malone’s
framing. That post has since been deleted.

Among the artists coming to Minhaj’s defense was Whoopi Goldberg,
who spoke at length on _The View_ about the fallibility of trying to
hold a comic’s feet to the fire over the truth: “If you’re going
to hold a comic to the point where you’re going to check up on
stories, you have to understand, a lot of it is not the exact thing
that happened because why would we tell exactly what happened? It’s
not that interesting,” she said
[[link removed]].
“There’s information that we will give you as comics that will
have grains of truth, but don’t take it to the bank. That’s our
job, a seed of truth: sometimes truth and sometimes total BS.”

Malone even says as much in her New Yorker piece, observing that
“the nature of storytelling, let alone comedic storytelling, is
inventive.” Still, she argues, “the stakes appear to change when
entertainers fabricate anecdotes about current events and issues of
social injustice.”

The facts may point one way. The “emotional truth” points another.

It must be noted that there is a place where jokes are, to some degree
and on a still fairly ad hoc basis, held to a higher standard of fact:
in comedic news programming. This is, of course, a format
that _The_ _Daily Show_ made into an institution, with
correspondents and acolytes spinning off similar shows, from _The
Colbert Report_ to _Last Week Tonight with John
Oliver_ to _Patriot Act_ itself. A comedic news anchor walks a
delicate line; they must have the ability to play with facts while
never actually obscuring reality. It’s a position entirely reliant
on having the trust of the audience. Nothing is funny if you’re busy
questioning what’s real. This is exactly the job Minhaj was after;
the one it seems he won’t get.

Malone may not have intended her piece to do more than poke holes in
Minhaj’s storytelling, but its cultural impact was to make people
see Minhaj, at least initially, as an opportunistic manipulator of the
truth. “Nobody’s mad at him for making stuff up,” Jay Caspian
Kang stated
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part of a larger response to Malone’s piece. “It’s the way he
did it and the benefit it gave him and how it all feels self serving
in the worst way (and not funny).” Malone’s article reports that
various sources she’d spoken to, all anonymous, “bristled at
Minhaj’s moralizing posture.” The idea that Minhaj “tonally
presents himself as a person who was always taking down the despots
and dictators of the world and always speaking truth to power” is
“grating,” according to one anonymous source.

_Patriot Act_ didn’t depend on Minhaj’s experiences for its moral
arbitration, but upon journalism. Like all other comedy news shows,
it’s mainly depersonalized, written by a team of writers, not just
Minhaj, and clearly dependent upon fact-based reporting. Malone
suggests that this production format isn’t infallible. “In one
instance,” she reports, “Minhaj grew frustrated that fact-checking
was stymying the creative flow during a final rewrite, and a pair of
female researchers were asked to leave the writers’ room.” Both
Minhaj and _Patriot Act_ co-creator Prashanth Venkataramanujam
defended the show’s research and writing process, but taken with the
other threads Malone brings in, the implication becomes one of
dismissiveness: Minhaj appears to handwave facts and get impatient
with writers and researchers who try to pin him down to them. She
never gives specific examples of this actually resulting in an error
or misinformation appearing on the show.

For what it’s worth, it sounds like what Minhaj and Venkataramanujam
describe here is simply the writers wishing to be unimpeded by
editing. Typically part of the purpose of having editors and
fact-checkers is so that the journalists and writers, in this case
Minhaj, can do their best work without having their creative flow
stifled in the moment by the necessarily more structured process of
editing. The process is more fungible than the end result.

As for the creative output that _Patriot Act_ yielded, despite the
disputes that may have happened on set, Malone finds no fault with it.
However, by highlighting critiques of Minhaj’s overall tone and
posture, Malone seems to invite readers to believe that there’s
something inherently smarmy about Minhaj’s use of Islamophobia as a
talking point, even when those talking points, as aired on _Patriot
Act_, are entirely factual.

Minhaj _is_ Muslim, and anti-Muslim discrimination and his
experience of it are real. Adopting a moralizing posture over your own
life and identity, even when you fudge some of the details for the
sake of drama, is arguably something most of us do. And when one is
backed by reputable journalism, as on _Patriot Act _(or,
presumably, _The Daily Show_) the moral posture should speak for
itself regardless of who voices it. Witness the New Yorker
[[link removed]] itself
in 2019: A report on Minhaj’s _Patriot Act_ episode on journalist
Jamal Khashoggi ends with the assertion “the truth is on Minhaj’s
side.”

So where does all this leave us?

If a touch of glibness sneaks in while trying to work through this
morass, that’s because there appears to be glibness on all sides:
Malone appears to be glibly dismissive of Minhaj’s intentions and
his deliberate choice to go for drama rather than accuracy in his art.
Minhaj appears to be glibly dismissive of the criticism that glossing
details and distorting timelines undermines his authority as a comedy
news host as well as what he’s trying to say about identity and
lived experience.

Both of them appear to be glibly dismissive of the other’s framing
of what he did. Malone, in her further response
[[link removed]] to
Minhaj’s video, ignores the main accusation he levels at her in it
— that she chose to leave out much of the context he provided in
order to further her narrative. She instead asserts that nothing
Minhaj said really contradicts her version of things, which is both
technically true and a reduction of a lot of complicated
back-and-forth.

Minhaj complains in his rebuttal video that Malone seems more
concerned with the people on the other side of his storytelling —
for instance, an undercover FBI agent who surveilled Muslim
communities — than with his own intent and the Muslims whose
experiences he seeks to represent. According to him, Malone also
doesn’t seem to _care_ if the stakes are higher for those people
than they are for Minhaj himself.

We might argue that Minhaj is rich, successful, privileged, and
powerful — he doesn’t need coddling. Sure. But the simplest
response to all of this might be that he still deserves to be met in
good faith. The reason the New Yorker piece RUBBED
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WRONG WAY
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that the reporting was technically in error, but that like the comedy
it was critiquing, it relied on a certain framing of facts to make its
larger point. In the end, that framework felt to many readers like an
exercise in bad faith.

And that, ultimately, underscores why Minhaj is right on an important
point: The “emotional truth” of a situation does matter even when
the facts don’t entirely align with it.

* Hasan Minhaj
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* the Daily Show
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* post truth
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* Anti-Muslim policies
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* anti-Muslim xenophobia
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