Will Mixing Lies In His Comedy End Hasan Minhaj's Career
October 8, 2023
In May this year, Hasan Minhaj was considered to have a good chance to replace Trevor Noah as the host of the Daily Show. “I’m definitely open to the conversation," Minhaj told Variety's Awards Circuit Podcast.
The Daily Show, broadcast since 1996 on the American cable network Comedy Central, takes a satirical look at news. From 2014 to 2018, Minhaj was one of the “correspondents” on the show. Then, for two years, he was the host of “Patriot Act”, a weekly comedy news show on Netflix, similar to The Daily Show. The series won an Emmy and a Peabody Award.
Now Minhaj's career as a comedian, at least on the big stages of America, is in question. Last month, a story in the New Yorker titled Hasan Minhaj's "Emotional Truths". exposed that many of Minhaj's autobiographical stories were lies.
One of the Minhaj’s false stories is in his 2022 Netflix standup special, “The King’s Jester.” It is about a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent infiltrating a mosque in California's Sacramento-area in 2002, soon after the 911 terrorist attacks in the U.S. Minhaj, who was in high school, and his family, were members of the mosque. The special included details that were apparently fabricated incidents, such as Minhaj being slammed against a police car as a suspected terrorist.
Another false story was about the fallout from Minhaj’s “Patriot Act” segments on the killing of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism. Minhaj said a letter was sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital and the powder turned out not to be anthrax. Minhaj had received an envelope filled with white powder that was not anthrax; but his daughter was not there or nearby, despite his claim that includes minute exaggerated fabricated details of his child’s reaction and how the emergency room personnel “the moment they see the baby, they rip the clothes off her and take her away.”
Minhaj, 38-years-old, was born in Davis, California. His parents Najme and Seema Minhaj were Muslims, from Aligarh, India, who immigrated to the United States. His father is an organic chemist and his mother a doctor.
After graduating from Davis Senior High School, Minhaj attended the University of California, Davis; he earned a B.A. in political science in 2007. In 2004, while at UC Davis, Minhaj got interested in performing stand-up comedy after watching Chris Rock’s Never Scared.
He then started performing. “It felt like I was a superhero,” Minhaj told a UC Davis admissions blog. “I would put on my costume and go out into the city. By day I’m a political science student, and by night getting in my Nissan Stanza and hoping my car won’t break down on the way to San Francisco and doing open mics.”
In 2003, during his first year at UC Davis, Minhaj met Beena Patel, a Hindu, and went on to marry her in 2016. Patel earned an undergraduate degree in 2007 and a Masters’ in Public Health in 2008, both from UC Davis. They have two children and live in the New York area.
"In Minhaj’s approach to comedy, he leans heavily on his own experience as an Asian American and Muslim American, telling harrowing stories of law-enforcement entrapment and personal threats," The New Yorker noted.
In Homecoming King, Minhaj talks about growing up in Davis as a child of Muslim Indian immigrants and weaves together themes of race, heartbreak, forgiveness, and love.
He is amazed most about how the show resonated with people who don’t even share his background, he told the UC Davis blog. “I’ve had people tell me stories…where they put themselves on the line to someone they loved and they weren’t accepted for who they were. It’s great that it (the show) transcends race, class, gender — all these lines. Everybody has felt like an outsider at some point. It’s ironic that’s what unites us all.”
In his comedy and at speaking engagements, Minhaj “draws on his personal history and the immigrant experience to explore the modern cultural and political landscape with depth and sincerity,” according to his profile on The Harry Walker Agency, which represents Minhaj for paid speaking engagements. He has spoken at events organized by Arizona State University and Palo Alto Networks, a cyber-security firm with a market value of $82 billion, and others.
Now Minhaj’s “sincere” exploration of his Muslim immigrant experience is in doubt. "Minhaj acknowledged, for the first time, that many of the anecdotes he related in his Netflix specials were untrue," reports The New Yorker.
Minhaj defends his work telling the publication, “My comedy…is seventy per cent emotional truth—this happened—and then thirty per cent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction…the emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.”
Since the New Yorker story, Minhaj "hasn’t elicited much sympathy from the comedy community—and may have even lost out on the coveted Daily Show hosting gig," according to The Daily Beast. Whoopi Goldberg is one of the few comedians to defend Minhaj. Speaking of comedians on a TV show, she said “we tell stories and we embellish them."
However, “When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people” writes Jason Zinoman, the New York Times comedy critic, discussing Minhaj’s lies. The “trust operates differently for politicians and journalists than for artists, but it matters for us all. Treat it carelessly and the price can be steep.”
Will the New Yorker exposure of Minhaj’s lies end his career as a comedian, at least on the major American stages, or will he get a second chance?
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