How Hasan Minhaj Taught Me to Keep it Real

Finally, an Indian-American comedy that’s proudly authentic.

UPDATE 12/30/16: Dunya is bringing Homecoming King to Vancouver! February 10th, 2016 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Tickets are selling fast at dunya.ca/live

I think I could launch a tech startup.

I don’t have the technical skills for it, or even a valid idea. But I feel that if I did have either of those things, there’s nothing structural or systemic stopping me from going forth and doing it. Because from the Satya Nadellas and Sundar Pichais at the very top of the tech industry to the investors, founders, and countless other South Asians working and achieving greatness at all levels, I’ve seen it being done by people who look like and have similar backgrounds as me time and time again. Just seeing them makes it all feel very possible.

Now the truth is, I don’t really want to start a tech company. I want to produce films that accurately reflect diverse audiences back to themselves in a time where we are are severely lacking stories that represent our lives.

But before helping under-represented people tell their stories we need to take a conceptual step back and help them realize that they even have stories to tell in the first place. It’s a difficult mental barrier for people to break through as an audience, but it’s also difficult barrier to break through with myself as a creator.

Homecoming King, the new one-man show from The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj, changes that. Because by being authentically Indian American, staying relatable to a wide audience, and doing it with an inspiring level of quality, he’s shown me that it can be done.

From the Drake and Kanye music that plays as you enter the theatre, to the references to Kobe, Eminem, and Kabhi Khusi Kabhi Gham, this show wasn’t about working out how to be Indian and American. It is just Indian American. It’s own thing. This is something we haven’t seen many narratives about. And it’s a big, big deal.

As first generation South Asian kids, it’s not that we grow up without ANY films with people like us. There’s just a split: Hollywood films had people who lived where we lived and sounded like us; Bollywood had people who lived where our parents came from and looked like us. But there’s always going to be some cultural distance between Kal Ho Na Ho and Mean Girls, even though they came out in the same year and we do love them both. We can’t fully relate to either.

Hasan Minhaj bridges that gap. There are Indian American celebrities out there who don’t actively talk about an identity crisis, but they seem to have dealt with plural identities by just giving up or hidden anything that made them culturally unique. Fit in the system and you’re allowed to play.

But Hasan isn’t going to make his name playing a guy named “Rick” who’s diversity claim-to-fame is “wow, that character’s so ‘normal’ that he could have been played by a white guy!”. He’s making his name by quoting Urdu poems and letting them sink in for a full few seconds before explaining it to the non-South Asian folks in the crowd. We don’t usually get spoken to first. As an audience member, it felt like my cultural background was being respected in a way that I didn’t know was “allowed”, like we don’t have to hide behind a fear of not being understood. That what makes us “different” actually makes us unique. It’s not all about “being Indian”, but it’s also not ignoring that background.

It’s not that Hasan didn’t care at all if non-South Asians would understand what he was talking. After the show, I overheard Hasan and a voice that was presumably director Greg Walloch backstage, Hasan checking in on if it was okay that he left certain Hindi words from the show undefined — like champals and pitai (note to self: great name for a rap mixtape). Knowing that Hasan is still working on the cultural balance of his show this gave me great comfort: one because it’s not like he has it all magically figured out, and two because he is trying anyways. If there’s one lesson I learned from Homecoming King that I can apply to my work telling stories that a wide audience can relate to, it’s to err on the side of authenticity. To contextualize the new without trying to make everything so universal that the story is no longer relatable to anyone specific.

Err on the side of authenticity.

Hasan chose authenticity, and it seems to have worked. If you’re going to do a one-man show in Chelsea, you’re going to pull in some white folks — but all the white, Asian, and South Asian audience members I spoke to after the show all found it engaging and entertaining. No small feat.

A massive factor in the show’s success was the work and craft put in to bringing it all together. Cultural significance aside, the level of skill, and clearly years of practice that it took to get to the point of putting a show like this together was admirable to say the least.

Hasan truly embodied the characters in the stories he told, and the whole show felt so fresh that it was like he was telling his stories for the first time. From the writing, to the crowd work, to the heartfelt delivery of it all — you can call it natural talent, but even natural talent doesn’t just manifest itself. You have to put your head down and work at it for years, and it’s clear that that is exactly what Hasan has done.

After the show I listened to Prom, his 2014 piece for The Moth that served as the basis for one of the acts of the show and it actually feels LESS fresh than him performing it on stage now. If I saw the show again in a year — which I would in a heartbeat — I’m confident it would be even better.

The constant improvement betrays that fact that while the original story was well received, Hasan’s never stopped improving upon and honing in on the perfect way to tell it. There’s no substitute for hard work, and I’m going to carry that back to Vancouver with a renewed focus on everything that I do.

Homecoming King opened up my brain. Between this one-man show and other rare works of art that I’ve felt I can relate to, like Aasif Mandvi’s film Today’s Special and Trevor Noah’s standup comedy being able to joke about and reflect some of my Indian-African background (oddly enough, all three of these guys ended up on The Daily Show — which magician does the hiring over there?), I now feel like I can more confidently put pen to paper. That my main concern shouldn’t be people “getting” it, but in being authentic. And that there’s no magical substitute for putting your head down and working on the craft.

Finally, I feel like I have writers and performers to truly look up to.

UPDATE: Dunya is bringing Homecoming King to Vancouver! February 10th, 2016 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Tickets are selling fast at dunya.ca/live