Hasan Minhaj is ready to overcome the backlash

Hasan Minhaj enters Hasan Minhaj: With the head Credit: Courtesy of Amir Hamja/Netflix

Eeighteen minutes into his new Netflix special, head off Hasan Minhaj tackles the controversy that rocked the comedy world and bounced back into the mainstream last year, raising questions about the role of truth in storytelling and the very nature of the artistic process. When Minhaj finally brings up the subject here, in his third special, live Bay Area audience members sit a little straighter in their chairs. Some even exchange a knowing look.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen this,” Minhaj says with a smile. “Last year, The New Yorker he checked out my stand-up comedy.” He then pantomimes a reporter typing away at his keyboard and starts laughing. “They were like, Ahahaha. Breaking news: Wizards are not wizards,” he says.

This is not quite what happened. In September 2023, The New Yorker published an article challenging the authenticity of the personal stories Minhaj told in his first two stand-up specials, Homecoming King (2017) and The king’s jester (2022). Minhaj quickly confirmed that he had taken artistic liberties with the facts, but that the stories, related to the racism he faced as an American of Indian descent and Muslim faith after 9/11 , contained “emotional truths” and were based on lived experiences. He criticized the reports – which the magazine defended – as misleading.

The report and Minhaj’s response seemed to test the limits of what John Oliver, a colleague Daily show former student, once identified as the “internal logic” of comedy: “You’ll do anything for a laugh, like a sociopath.” But that was July 2016, before phrases like “alternative facts” and a new golden age of disinformation dominated the larger media ecosystem.

At the time of the scandal, Minhaj was best known as a former correspondent for The daily show and then the host of his own Netflix show, Patriot act As a performer known for offering an insightful and comedic take on current events, often in the style of investigative journalism, to be branded a maker seemed like a coup. Minhaj said the scandal led to the end of an almost definitive hosting bid The daily show after Trevor Noah’s departure, Comedy Central apparently felt that viewers would no longer trust him to deliver even the funny news.

Since then, audiences have been waiting for Minhaj to tackle the controversy head-on in his comedy. The title of the special certainly seems like a nod to the backlash. But in head off Minhaj spends surprisingly little time on the article and the subsequent controversy; perhaps he thinks the 20-minute video defense he posted last October was enough. In the special, Minhaj finds a new word to describe the scandal: “torky.” “It’s not even good. I haven’t fucked a porn star. I didn’t make a child,” he says. “I was caught embellishing for dramatic effect. The same crime your aunt is guilty of at Thanksgiving.

While the controversy is only one part of the one-hour special, its presence is felt in its overall structure and tone. In defending himself last fall, Minhaj drew a distinction between what he does on comedy news shows and his work on stage during a stand-up show. The first is a “political comedy,” which must be grounded in truth and rigorously fact-checked, he said. The latter, in his words, is “comic storytelling,” which foregrounds emotion.

On the comic spectrum, Minhaj contours, with the head operates more in the tradition of political comedy. It has the feel of a classic foot set, marking a strong contrast with Homecoming King i The king’s jester. Both of these specials played as one-man shows, off-Broadway or one night at The Moth. The specials featured dynamic camera movements, sweeping in and out of the stage, sometimes directly in Minhaj’s face so he could address the non-theatrical audience directly, heightening the dramatic effect of his stories.

In head off instead of captivating his audience with tall tales, Minhaj opts for a more observational mode, a tight set of jokes strung together to deliver his take on topics like politics, race and Zillow, with a collection of anecdotes personal sprinkled everywhere. It is as if Minhaj anticipated his audience’s expectation of an epic narrative The New Yorker saga, just to mention it briefly and continue to showcase his craft in a different comedic style. The new special plays as an implicit response to anyone who doubted his stand-up skills in the wake of the scandal: he might have been embellished, but he wasn’t on a crutch. with the head it’s just as good, if not sometimes better, than any of his previous work. Critics of Minhaj’s good faith need to step aside.

Underlying much of Minhaj’s special is the point of view of a millennial American, a perspective that is largely absent from the seats of American late-night comedy, with the exception of notable of the rotating cast of hosts a The daily show, that they must be more impersonal as part of their shared duties. Here, Minhaj, on the other hand, can bring the personal to the fore. Advantageously, he vents the deepest frustrations of his generation. Take the coronavirus, for example. While some saw a catastrophe, Minhaj saw a lost opportunity. For years, millennials complained about America’s housing shortage. “And then in March of 2020, God was like, here,” Minhaj said in the voice of God, “here’s a disease that specifically kills the elderly.”

But perhaps the biggest contrast between with the head and the first two specials are Minhaj’s own arrangement on stage. In the previous work, you could feel every beat of the performance, the delivery of every flawless joke, but palpably the byproduct of rehearsal. In the new special, Minhaj feels relaxed, confident in a way that conveys more experience. With controversy and dozens of stories from his past behind him, the special focuses his own thoughts on where we are now and where we’re going, and boy, can we use all the help we can get.

Contact us at [email protected].