Hasan Minhaj brought the Indian-Muslim immigrant experience to the American consciousness, in an American way –– via his Netflix shows. Then he was taken down by the last word on American culture, The New Yorker, and now he’s returned with a video explaining the various shapes of truth.
In 2017, Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King was released and, going by its universal acclaim, racism was released from the shackles of black and white. Finally, everyone knew, it happens to brown people too.
But The New Yorker profile pointed out that the events that grounded Minhaj’s identity as a victim of racism were based on a 21st century semantic frame: the actual truth versus the emotional truth. Minhaj’s onscreen representation of events was derived from the latter. They were subject to embellishment, fabrication, and, occasionally, outright invention. What counted, however, was that this was Minhaj’s emotional truth. He is, of course, a victim of racism: but so are millions of others. And what happened to them didn’t necessarily happen to him.
It was a quick, 90-degree angled fall from grace. Minhaj was poised to replace Trevor Noah as the host of The Daily Show, only to be taken out of the running. X (formerly Twitter) was ablaze, with people commenting that this is what they had suspected all along: Minhaj, the affable, self-proclaimed truth-teller in an age of misinformation, delightfully relatable, and a liberal-hero in illiberal times, was too good to be true. The Trump-era was over, but Minhaj’s star-power was yet to dwindle.
“Hasan is America. And America is Hasan,” wrote Noah in 2019, the year Minhaj was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.
The New Yorker article came out on 15 September. A month and a half later, the comedian issued his response: a confession, and a factcheck. “I made artistic choices to express myself and to drive home larger issues affecting me and my community. And I feel horrible that I let people down,” says Minhaj.
But then he goes on to dismantle each claim made by Clare Malone, the author of The New Yorker article. What comes out from his fact-check of Malone’s article is that the 4128-word journalistic enquiry into his comedy was an exercise in selective omissions, obfuscations, and manipulations to reach a predetermined narrative about the comedian and his shows.
Also read: Hasan Minhaj’s The King’s Jester on Netflix is his grand resignation from political satire
White powder and anthrax
According to Hasan Minhaj: The King’s Jester, his 2022 Netflix special, Minhaj was once sent anthrax, which spilled on to his daughter. He was forced to rush her to hospital. He concluded that it was a consequence of two episodes from his 2018 chat show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj — a show where he laced together comedy and politics, providing researched hot-takes on a number of topics, including the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Modi’s strongman image, and the decline of dissent in India.
In The King’s Jester, Minhaj attributed the anthrax threat to the Modi segment, and an episode on the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (The Khashoggi episode was taken down by Netflix on the grounds that it violated Saudi Arabia’s anti-cybercrime law.)
The Patriot Act was hugely successful, and intrinsically global. News was simplified, but with enough nuance. Watching the show could be treated as an intellectual pursuit, a substitute for a lengthy op-ed –– it taught you what to think.
It’s not difficult to imagine the consequences of Patriot Act’s more politically sensitive episodes. And Minhaj did—with the anthrax threat. But The New Yorker debunked it. There were no records of his daughter at any New York hospital. Later, Minhaj said he did receive an envelope with white powder, but quickly realised it wasn’t anthrax.
While exaggeration and embellishment are permissive in most social environments, and the fluidity of truth is a product of today’s age, it’s also acceptable to feel betrayed by a man whose career is based on the authenticity of his personal experiences.
The spaces that Homecoming King (whose ‘emotional truth’ Minhaj justifies in his response) and The King’s Jester occupy in popular culture may no longer hold. They were packaged less as comedy and more as dossiers of Minhaj’s life.
Comedy is art, but Minhaj’s brand of comedy, like art, forges public opinion. But news binds public opinion too, and there’s no artistic licence there. The argument that journalists should be scrutinising politicians as carefully as they do comedy, holds. But comedians, be it in India or abroad, are owners of a lot of cultural capital.
The New Yorker article is not neutral. It creates a skewed image, but Minhaj is a celebrity. The interviews were held in the presence of his publicist. He’s heavily quoted in the article. With his response video, the balance has shifted again––Minhaj is the victim and the magazine is the perpetrator.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)