Hasan Minhaj’s “emotional truths” are stretched
Comedy can serve as an intellectual platform for processing life as well as having a good laugh. Hasan Minhaj was my favorite comedian for being a master of modern comedy, as I experienced in person at a New Haven performance in August 2021. His relatable content on the Indian American experience, and youthful take, hit hard with many audiences, including me.
In 2022 Minhaj’s 2022 Netflix standup special, “The King’s Jester,” he tells a story about an FBI informant who infiltrated his family’s Sacramento-area mosque, in 2002 when Minhaj was in high school. He describes Brother Eric, a white man who said he was trying to convert to Islam, gaining the trust of the mosque community. Minhaj says he decided to mess with Brother Eric, telling the man he wanted to get his pilot’s license. This leads to a dramatic retelling of how a young Minhaj was slammed into the hood of a cop car, for being a supposed terrorist.
Years later while watching the news with his father, Minhaj recounts seeing a story about Craig Montelih, who assumed the cover of a personal trainer when he became an FBI informant in Muslim communities in Southern California. Minhaj shows clips of news footage from a news report on Montelih, and segues to Hamid Hayat, who spent much of his adult life in prison based on a coerced confession.
Minhaj speaks about the fallout of “Patriot Act,” his Netflix comedy series, and displays threatening tweets sent to him. Most disturbingly, he relates a story about a letter filled with white powder that spilled on his young daughter. It turned out not to be anthrax, but still seemed a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedy has real-world consequences.
Recently it was revealed that these jarring events were heavily if not entirely fabricated. Montelih, AKA Brother Eric, told a reporter for The New Yorker that Minhaj’s entire story was false. “I have no idea why he would do that.” Montelih never even worked in Sacramento.
In an interview for The New Yorker Minhaj admitted his “daughter has never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized.” He had opened up a letter that contained some sort of white powder, but never told anyone outside of his wife.
Minhaj claims both these stories are based on “emotional truth”–that the ends justify the falsified means. “The punchline is worth the fictionalized premise,” he says.
The issue with this is how Minhaj treads dangerously into memoir territory, making heavy political statements that, when actually true, undermine his point. He only used emotional truths in his comedy specials, not Patriot Act, he says. Is he manipulating his audience? He doesn’t think so: “I think they are coming for the emotional roller-coaster ride.”
Yet these traumatic encounters he invented could be distasteful, for the fact that other people have actually experienced them. Though Minhaj may say his stories are grounded in truth, they didn’t actually happen to him. The key is that Minhaj’s work blurs distinctions between entertainment and opinion journalism. Embellishment for laughs is common; for example, Jerry Seinfeld said that most of his standup and opinions in it are completely made up, but no one expects serious commentary from comedians of his ilk.
Hasan Minhaj is making serious points about social justice issues, not just trying to get laughs, which separates him from a lot of the comedians he is trying to take refuge with. He has built credibility as someone who delivers news, as done through Patriot Act, which according to some of the staff had some dubious fact-checking rituals. Hasan claimed that his act for his Netflix specials is character-based and that differs from when he is delivering news, but he doesn’t distinguish well between the two personas. His tone is solemn and hushed as if to say “You have to believe me, these experiences happened to me and therefore, these points are valid.” (Hershal Pandya)
When Minhaj talks about weighty topics such as racial injustice or hate crimes, it feels like deception for him to cherry-pick the truth. One concern is the undermining of movements for justice. His invention makes it harder for people who have genuinely experienced certain hardships to be believed and for these issues to be taken seriously.
One of his arguments is that emotional truth is more important than actual truth to make that larger point. Is he being held to an unfair standard? No one is criticizing white comedians for this, but his content is different and has to be taken more seriously, which is the core of the problem. While Minhaj may think his serial embellishments are the only way to air stories and build a platform, a flawed system doesn’t redeem a person who exploits it.
Athena Brown is an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut.
This piece was originally published by the Daily Campus:
