We Need To Talk About Hasan Minhaj

A Tragic Fall For Exponential Likes

The news of Hasan Minhaj’s liberties with truth came to me via text message when a fellow fan described him as “falling from the angels.” I was too busy to investigate at the time and was immediately convinced it was hater clickbait. Similar accusations have been made of Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and John Stewart, who have had to repeatedly remind reporters that they are comedians and not journalists and are, therefore not responsible for tempering bias or telling “complete” stories. As a poet who writes openly about trauma, I spend a lot of time thinking about how important the details are. If the rug was blue, but red would make a better image, does it matter? Do the details of the assault in their minutiae really matter more than the images I use to describe its impact on my psyche? Isn’t the impact the whole point of the poem, the thing I know I see in others that they know to see in me? So when I saw “emotional truth” as part of Minhaj’s defense in the headlines, I assumed he made minor exaggerations for effect, and largely dismissed the issue. When there were more texts from more friends, I realized that I didn’t want to know. Though Minhaj and I are about the same age, I was the auntie in the room refusing to believe that the charming boy I loved to give cookies could be at fault. Not our Hasan. No no, he’s a good boy. Despite the antics and the silly obsession with sneakers, we can trust him.

Photo courtesy Patrick O'Shea/TNS

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, wildly popular comedian and news commentary show host Hasan Minhaj, a pioneer of contemporary South Asian diasporic cultural representation in American mainstream media and a community darling, told stories in his Netflix  stand-up specials, Homecoming King and The King’s Jester, that were not just exaggerated, but in some cases entirely fabricated. He claimed that the “emotional truths” he expresses are significantly more important than the facts, but he did not, as is any good performer’s responsibility, develop a contract with his audience that allowed them to see and understand the different standards to which he held himself on his news show, The Patriot Act, and on the comedy stage. The facts he fabricated were related to stunts he pulled for episodes for The Patriot Act, which in turn pivoted on the trust he built with audiences with Homecoming King. All of his work is deeply self-referential, which is part of his appeal. He tells stories with an air of authenticity that we trust, and it’s that authenticity that sets the precedent for how we understand the rest of his material. As it turns out, little of it was authentic. 

Hasan Minhaj’s existence made space in the world for politically engaged and rebellious South Asian Americans who rarely saw themselves or their interests represented. He’s irreverent, rebellious, intelligent, unafraid to take on complex, hot-button issues and put despots and tyrants on the spot. When Homecoming King came out in 2017, I hadn't spoken to my ex, an Indian-American man who grew up in the suburbs of Long Island, since our relationship concluded. After watching it, I found myself jumping up and down and emailing him about the show. He took me up on the recommendation immediately and watched the show not once but twice in one sitting. We had never seen anyone like him–like us–on TV, talking about experiences that so many of us have in a really compelling way. That interaction opened lines of communication again between two people who were unclear about whether we could ever stand each other. That’s extremely powerful. Hasan Minhaj’s career was a testament to how much representation can matter. 

In 2020 and 2021, when so many of the high school students I taught were struggling to wrap their heads around the protests against police brutality and the murder of George Floyd, Patriot Act became the source text for discussions about planned structural inequity between Asian Americans and African Americans in the production of the model minority myth. In order to understand the present, Hasan was elucidating history in a context and through a lens that my majority black and brown students had never encountered. It spoke to them directly. My South Asian students, of which there were many, explained how pervasive anti-black racism and casteism is in South Asian communities and how frequently their families do not see their fight against racism as related to that of American black folk. In that moment, they aligned themselves with Hasan and with me as generations of South Asian Americans who would make it their business to live in the world with an intentional politics and praxis of racial justice and reparations for black America. Hasan gave us someone to look up to who was unafraid to prove our parents and leaders wrong in the name of the good. He represented an America for the young Americans who look like him, whose friends look like his friends, and whose dreams, disappointments, and fears might look a little like his. His work was the point of departure for some of the more fulfilling conversations of my high school teaching career. 

You understand, then, my reluctance to see the golden boy maligned. However, a New Yorker article penned by Clare Malone in which she confronts Hasan about how his stories and her research of them don’t line up exposed Hasan as not only disingenuous, but completely unrepentant about his fabrications. In Homecoming King, Hasan’s core story is about the experience of being excited to go to prom with a crush, only to find his white prom date refusing him at the door because her mother was embarrassed by the idea of an Indian boy with her daughter in her prom photos. So many of us can relate intimately to similar instances of racism. The show ends on an enormous payoff when Hasan discovers years later that this woman went against her mother’s wishes and married an Indian-American man. As it turns out, in real life, the crush had never really said yes to Hasan, and after the show, she and her husband were doxxed and harassed for years. Hasan did nothing to stop it. In The King’s Jester, Hasan tells a story about recognizing an FBI informant surveilling his Muslim community at mosque and at his local gym, eventually being targeted by him and ending up with his face smashed on the side of a police car while he’s being arrested for suspicions of terrorism. The FBI informant he pointed out by name didn’t work with the FBI until years after when Hasan says the incident occurred, and never worked in Sacramento where Hasan grew up. Hasan tells another story about attempting to interview the Saudi Arabian Crowned Prince when he was doing a media blitz in New York, and receiving an envelope containing a suspicious white substance that spilled on his infant daughter, requiring a rush to the emergency room on suspicion that it was anthrax. None of this happened either. Hasan doubles down when asked about the discrepancies that show these stories are false, saying that “you have to take the shots you get in life” and that the “emotional truths’ matter more than the facts. 

The “emotional truth” is in fact that Muslim South Asian Americans experience insidious forms of racism all the time, and many of us had harrowing experiences in the years immediately following 9/11. Hasan made a name for himself as someone so committed to the joke that he’s willing to come close to breaking the law and endangering his family to get to the truth. He won our trust as a public intellectual for whom the facts were extremely important. His news show, Patriot Act, was one of the shows millions watched because he would provide verification and context in an environment rife with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Painting himself as a victim of extremely dangerous racist harassment of this kind has the same effect as the popularity of true crime with female readers and listeners; we become convinced that the level of threat against us is far greater than we could have imagined, and that clearly, speaking truth to power is reserved for those willing to take enormous risks. The world becomes more dangerous. In response, we become more conservative and less likely to take the risks we may need to take to live our truths, elbow our way into necessary freedoms, and take up the space that Hasan models for us to take up. Instead, these stories make us afraid for ourselves and our families while painting Hasan as a daredevil gone rogue, a Muslim superhero who knows no fear, even in the face of criticism from his wife and risks to his infant daughter’s wellbeing. It harms the community while aggrandizing Hasan, which has nothing to do with collective emotional truth. That’s just narcissism. 

Though there are many smart arguments that can and have been made about how much audiences can expect comedians to be factual while on stage and how contracts of trust are built with audiences so that they take comedy seriously enough to find it funny, so to speak, these arguments don’t apply to Hasan. He didn’t just tell these stories on stage. He treated them as facts in later interviews in which he was presumably speaking as himself about the stakes involved in doing risky comedy–fabricated stakes that made up the “emotional truth” of his entire show. He does this with full understanding that our parasocial relationship with him is dependent on the belief of the stories he shares about his life. The actual emotional truth seems to be that fame, ratings, and accumulationist social media logic governs his choices more than any commitment or responsibility toward the audiences that launched his fame into the stratosphere, knowing that we trusted him with being thoughtful and rigorous–someone we can look up to and be proud of. 

It gets worse. Clare Malone found more damning off-stage behavior. As it turns out, female members of the research department of Patriot Act–the news show, the name for which he claims was inspired by the FBI informant incident that did not happen to him–were asked to sit in the hall for two hours when Hasan felt that fact-checking was getting in the way of creative flow, and he eventually stopped inviting anyone but the male head of the research department to writing sessions. Hasan paints himself as a feminist with enormous respect for his wife’s intellect–she’s a medical doctor–and tells moving stories about their love from childhood and the hopes he has for his daughter. Not only was he not rigorous about the content and form of his performative work, but it seems he was hypocritical behind the scenes as well. While it’s true that he didn’t flash an intern or grope a colleague at a holiday party, he’s guilty of the much more common kind of sex-based discrimination that takes place in workplaces that gets less attention and deserves more scrutiny throughout the working world. The lawsuit employees drew up against The Patriot Act was settled out of court. If he was at liberty to talk about it, would he double down there, too? 

There have been think pieces, defenses, and indictments aplenty online over the past week. I’m less interested in the debates around comedy and emotional truth than I am in the effect of this loss of faith for South Asian diasporic communities that held him up as one of our golden boys and made duped aunties of us all. If I give him the benefit of the doubt, I can theorize that he’s a creature of the social media age that builds community algorithmically, and he thought we knew that. The ethics match the business model, and authenticity and boyish charm are his brand. It doesn’t do enough for me. It’s not enough to say he is a product optimized by shock value whose content is subservient to spikes in algorithmic success, and we should be aware of what we’re consuming. The onus isn’t on us to establish the contract of belief that maintains our attention. 

What does Hasan Minhaj’s story mean for South Asian diasporic representatives in mainstream media? How do his choices affect and influence how we look at Aparna Nacherla or Lily Singh? What price do figures like Trevor Noah pay for publicly praising him and considering him for the next permanent host of The Daily Show? Ultimately, it seems that the part of The King’s Jester that most explicitly framed itself as a bit held the most naked emotional truth in the whole show (funny how that works, isn’t it?). He makes a face and screws up his hands, saying “and then the Adderall kicks in,” running about to indicate being overwhelmed by the desire to make messes that will up his social media ratings. Over and over, he talks about his addiction to social media clout, joking that he attempted to interview the Saudi Arabian Crowned Prince so that he could trend. The gollum-like creature he imitates himself becoming, chasing his “precious” forever, may be, in fact, the most truthful part of the whole show. At one point, he says, “all that love that Mommy and Daddy never gave you, nom nom nom.” This moment gives me pause. 

The pressure to succeed, go to Ivy League schools, and become doctors and engineers is a running thread along his jokes. He comes from an upper middle-class family in Sacramento who themselves came from wealth in India. No one expects their Indian son to be the exception when it comes to unprecedented success as a comedian. So many of us dive headlong into paths of success that we know we’re good at, even wildly so, on an endless psychological treadmill for attention, validation, acceptance, some constant, immeasurable, soul-crushing myth in the distance that doesn’t ever stop shining through the windows, no matter how many times you tell yourself it’s not real. I’m not pretending to know a single thing about Hasan Minhaj’s relationship to upward mobility or success personally, but I’ll take the liberty of saying that this is one of the “emotional truths” for many diasporic desi folks. I do personally know what it’s like to get to a point where being good at something and known for it becomes more important than doing the thing itself, and doing it right. It’s a horrifying dissociation that has resonance with addiction psychology. A kind of angry maw. 

How badly must he have needed that endless, global stream of love to not consider enough the consequences of his choices? To curate such a polished, impeccable image of so many of our experiences, who like us, had experienced a wide range of horrid, life-altering things because of his race and origin? When your desperation and your business model share a nervous system, you fall victim to your own success very quickly. This is the trouble with our late capitalist corruption of language and information; suddenly, information costs nothing, means nothing, is everywhere, and is less important than measurable data about financial outcomes and projections. If you’re Hasan Minhaj, maybe you think hey, I have a young child for whom I want to pave a bright future in the hardest of economies under climate change, and for that, I will ham up anything. It’s possible that the desire outgrew reasonable scale. The story of the ambitious success story corrupted by hubris is as old as the first known work of literature, the epic of Gilgamesh, followed by pretty much every ancient Greek tragedy and all of Elizabethan tragedy. To his peers and those of us who aspire to some kind of visibility, the ability to have a voice, to be seen, to be loved and validated by our own, let Hasan be a lesson to us to remember that no number of likes is worth compromising one’s integrity, not for laughs, not for money, not for anything, or for anyone. 

Until next Sunday.