Hasan Minhaj: Should comedians be allowed to "lie"?
And 9 other things worth sharing
Hasan Minhaj is an American, Muslim comedian who used to host a show called Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj.
Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj ran for six seasons and was filled with socio-economic, political commentary, comedic analysis, “expert” deep cuts and so on.
About a week ago, Minhaj released this video, where he essentially confronted accusations that he lies in his body of work (in this case, comedy). Summarily, The New Yorker published this article, titled “Hasan Minhaj’s Emotional Truths”. The article discusses the apparently troubling reality that many instances of racism, hostile confrontation, death threats etc that Minhaj talks about, particularly in his comedy, are fabricated—lies, which the comedian insists are “emotional truths”.
I read the article after seeing the video. But I already ranted a bit in this X thread I had written before reading the article.
To be fair, reading the article definitely gave me a broader picture of the issue. For instance, it is truly sensitive discourse when a citizen, in a culture or society as politically divided as America, shares anecdotes on racism and discrimination that turn out to not be true or largely embellished. One could truly argue that this diminishes the stories of many other true victims of these situations, and ultimately misleads society to antagonise wrongly or draw unfair conclusions.
However, that conversation is not particularly the aspect of the discourse that I concern myself with, seeing as it is purely subjective to the author/readers of that demographic and possibly redundant when considering the fact that we are talking about comedy.
Also, I am not American and as a result, it is difficult to interpret the criticism of lies in comedy from a purely American perspective. As such, if The New Yorker’s article was written to only appeal to American context, ideals or sensibilities, I preemptively apologise for missing that point.
Anyway, in defence of his invention of stories to sell his ideas or perspective on things, Hasan’s apology/fact-check video explained that his stand-up specials are more based on “emotional truth” than facts. He says that for his political commentary shows, such as Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, he tries to stay as true to the facts as possible. Using the comedy for delivery.
However, Clare Malone, the writer of the article, seems to suggest that most of Hasan’s viewers are likely not keen or aware of the duality of his stand-up and his socio-political commentator personas.
During our meeting, Minhaj drew a hard line between his hosting duties on “Patriot Act” and his stage work. In his Netflix specials, he said, he was allowed to create characters and events in service of storytelling, to sharpen his social points. The “emotional truth,” he told me, repeatedly, was more important. But in “Patriot Act,” his comedic license took a back seat to the information being conveyed. He seemed to sidestep the possibility that most people likely don’t parse which Hasan Minhaj they’re watching at a given moment.
— Excerpt from the article.
Concerning whether or not “most people” are aware of the difference between Hasan’s standup and his Patriot Act persona, I wouldn’t know. I can only speak for myself (and my answer is yes, as it seemed fairly obvious). However, I’m not most people. And I might not even qualify to be the average viewer, because I myself am both a media professional (early-career journalist) and a humorist who WRITES comedy (check out Ebuka Mic’s edutainment web series 4 Sure Tips season 3 which is to date my only show credit available online). So, using myself as an example or the barest denominator for the average audience member might be unfair.
However, that isn’t so much my concern as is the larger discourse around the honesty or lack thereof in comedy and comedians.
News Flash: Comedians “LIE“
Firstly, if you have never known this, it would do you the world of good to understand that comedians are MAKING A LOT OF STUFF UP. Yeah. Especially, if we are talking about how true (in terms of empirical fact) their stories are.
I mean, that would seem obvious, but apparently, it’s not for many people. This is probably a big reason so many people have a problem with comedy that doesn’t handle subject matters in the way they would prefer. Apparently, people believe comedians like Dave Chapelle are actually kicking older women in the genitals and comics like Bill Burr are actually punching holes in walls and huffing and puffing for a round total of 26 hours per day.
Now, of course, could you insist that there is nothing funny about a joke that uses “so I kicked her in the —” as a punchline? Of course, you can. And I agree. In fact, you could even go as far as arguing that simply making a joke mentioning anything related to certain subject matters (for instance, domestic abuse, race, or sexual violence), disqualifies you to be a respectable or listenable comedian. I would also agree.
However, expatiating on that would be digressing. We just want to know if comedians lie and if it should be considered okay. Well, to the best of my knowledge, not all comedy bits or jokes are real-life scenarios. Many jokes write themselves, of course, and are actually real. But a lot of them are made up too.
At this juncture, I feel like it is important to know, by nature, what a joke means.
What is a Joke?
Jokes, inherently, only qualify to be called jokes so far they are provoking amusement—or intended for the same purpose.
Essentially, what qualifies a joke is whether or not it is funny (or meant to be funny). It could be a good joke, a bad joke, a boring joke, a sick joke, a rude joke—but what qualifies a joke to be called a joke is the fact that it is said, written or shared, to be funny. To somebody. Maybe not to you, or me, but to somebody, and in most cases, to those with the sensibilities or taste for it. And jokes are the career commodity of comedians.
Some people criticise comedians for not being insightful enough. And oftentimes people do not give comedy a chance to be whimsical. On the flip side, some people only wish it to be whimsical, and would rather not hear anything political or religious in comedic work. So they think a comedian whose jokes they don’t want is a bad comic, and the ones whose jokes appeal to them is a “philosopher”.
This is the beginning of the problem.
From the definition of what a joke is, you can see that the only judge of what qualifies as a joke is whether or not it is funny—or intended to be. Not whether it’s true, insightful or even in factual alignment with reality.
So, in essence, jokes elicit amusement foremost, and applause or admiration merely as a byproduct or addition. Now, this could be a problem because the thing with comedians is that they are often clever thinkers.
Hence, it could constitute a pitfall to some comics when they are “affirmed” for their jokes, which they could sometimes use to communicate their positions on social matters. That affirmation might reinforce the position of comedians on said issues.
But at its core, comedy is only meant to be funny. It doesn’t have to be correct, or insightful, or world-changing. Not every joke is a clever treatise or conjuncture into the state of affairs. Some are just witty. Some are just clever. Some are just dumb. And some are just, well, funny.
As I said earlier, it is possible that some comedians interpret the laughter of the audience as an affirmation of the reliability of ideas. Arguably, it could be a weakness for comedians— making them lazy intellectuals. Because they know that their gift is such that, whichever place the thinking/idea stops, they can still make it into a laugh.
For the public, the simple solution to that is to go to comedy clubs to hear jokes—not lectures or sermons on how to live or better your life. Sure, you could always learn a thing or two about a new perspective. In fact, you may still get direct lectures, as these comics are often very smart people. But always remember two things:
Not every comedian is trying to be didactic. Some of them just want to have a good time and want you to have a good time. They don’t want you to agree with them, change your worldview or see them as social leaders.
Just because you don’t agree with something doesn’t mean it can’t be funny or insightful to you. You’re not destroying the progress of humanity by laughing at a joke that employs ill-informed or dated characters/ideas. If everyone in the audience understood this, laughing at a joke would simply mean the most harm/damage you are doing is to the comedian himself, (who has a responsibility to not view giggles as approval of their ideas).
Sure, I know Hasan Minhaj probably doesn’t fall into the category of comics who are just having fun. I know he wants you to change your mind about racism, and wants you to see him as a respectable voice in shaping collective consciousness.
I know.
But even if that is who he is, does that mean that his making jokes that are “lies” should be an indictment of everything he’s trying to achieve? And can comedians like him get away with saying things that aren’t true by calling them jokes?
In my opinion, yes they can.
Even if they start a sentence with the words, “true story”.
Entertainment and “truth”
Let me start by saying that I do believe people sometimes have unreasonable expectations from entertainment. Especially pertaining to reliance on it for telling factual truths.
Some people even watch crime, nature or history documentaries and think they are independent, objective sources of truth. I recall the astonishment of a friend as I explained to him that documentaries, even the ones about factual, documented history, are scripted/written. They have a plot structure, they have a narrative, and they have unique perspectives that are informed with facts. Of course, sometimes, the facts determine the perspective. But sometimes, perspective is pre-determined.
A documentary without any form of narrative is just CCTV footage.
And here’s my point: Even as boring and “objective” as it seems, Closed-circuit television does not depict “reality” (I mean, even reality TV is not reality but you probably already knew that).
If I showed you CCTV footage of two people arguing, you might be led to believe that you have an objective view of events, but that’s not the case. Because you don’t have context.
For instance, I could make a snide statement at somebody else in an argument, barely breathing it out, and when that person is retelling the situation to a mediator or third party, they’ll say something like, “he shouted at me…”.
While a CCTV camera would certainly help me argue my case to the contrary in court, it doesn’t mean the other person lied. They experienced me shouting at them. It just didn’t look that way to a third-party audience.
In this case, my “shouting” at my accuser, might not have meant a literal raising of decibels. Maybe the comment—perhaps a dirty secret, a jab at an insecurity of theirs, or even just my barely discernible change in tone as I said whatever I said—would’ve meant that the thing that I said was “loud” and essentially jumped out at the person.
That’s one of the reasons you could have two people retell an argument and they downplay their own comments and seemingly exaggerate the other person’s reactions or retorts. They might not be trying to be dishonest. That is how they remember it—and that is essentially what the course of events was for them.
This, I believe, is roughly what Hasan Minhaj refers to as “emotional honesty”.
Only that, this time, it’s even more honest, and intrinsically relevant, than analysing an argument.
Racism is real. And in Hasan’s case, racism could probably be so much of a passive-aggressive occurrence that is barely discernible until an afterthought, that the experience needs to be dramatised to have an emphatic effect on a group of listeners. Though “Barely discernible” is likely not the case for people like Hasan.
I recall, on a trip to Texas (my fault), having white people consistently walk diagonally just to avoid me. They would scurry away, or sometimes even pretend to have forgotten something in the opposite direction, where a blank wall stood to receive them. There was an instance where somebody nearly tripped just trying to do that. Of course, if I was telling that story as a comic I could say they fell over or gave me very dirty looks even though their looks were just mildly unclean—more like day-old dishes than week-old. I would say that if it made it a funnier story for my audience, but essentially, my story would explain implicitly, what I noticed in that moment.
Now, I could be mistaken. Perhaps I had a forcefield around me that was pushing people out of the way. Maybe I didn't take a shower and people were only avoiding me for my stench. But that’s the thing with discriminatory behaviour. You could reinterpret it however way you want, especially if you didn’t see it happen. In this case, I was with my brother, and after a mighty few occasions of people avoiding our stride, we both independently noticed it and he was already aware of it when I mentioned it to him (or he mentioned it to me? Can’t remember who said it to who first).
And I was only on that trip for three weeks. That was the mildest form of discrimination I could have possibly encountered. Sure, I met great people too. And of course, it might not have been racism. Maybe we were just assuming. Maybe people were scared of what we would do to them in the middle of a crowded mall. Maybe we actually looked “intimidating” (as intimidating as a 6-foot-tall glasses-wearing, slouching nerd with shorts can look beside a 5‘7” bearded millennial).
But as you can imagine, coming from a country where we are all black (or 99.99% anyway), I can probably tell when I’m being treated a bit differently for no apparent reason (didn’t I stink in Nigeria too?). Usually, when this sort of discrimination happens to people like me, we laugh it off because we know just how stupid racism actually is (all our saints and demons in Nigeria are black). We also know we don’t have to deal with this for the rest of our lives. Often, it takes us a while to even register it, because we aren’t anticipating it. We even explain it away (I mean, even when an admittedly pitch-black friend got called a NIGGER while on his way back from basketball practice during a US vacation, and when a pair of white people visited my uni in Nigeria and offered a couple of my mates bananas when they courteously went to greet them, we still said perhaps we were reaching by calling it racism). In fact, recounting my experience at The Galleria mall as racism still feels like I’m reaching, and I wouldn’t have if it didn’t help me make my point.
Minhaj is a Muslim born to Indian parents in AMERICA. Grew up entirely in America (admittedly, in the less conservative state of California, but we are familiar with that game already). I live all the way in Nigeria and just based on what we know of America, I’m 96% sure he experienced real racism and discrimination (the remaining 4% is me being very sure).
Hasan Minhaj dramatising the racism he experienced with his white prom date in high school (which he confirmed with corroborating evidence but The New Yorker article conveniently ignored), or the discrimination his community faced when they were targeted by undercover FBI informants seeking to uncover possible terror plots, is not him lying. His using composite characters and writing high-stakes scenarios to convey his point is not him lying. I would genuinely implore people to not only read that article or watch Hasan’s reaction video but actually see the specials themselves.
One can essentially note that sometimes, unaffected Americans, in my view, just seem to be very uncomfortable owning racism—even when they want to. And honestly, I get it. But that doesn’t make it okay.
Take it from me, a man living in a thriving, patriarchal society. Experiences like racism, or sexism, take so much work to even notice it in the first place, seeing as they are a reality essentially foreign to your sensibilities if you are not on the receiving end. So even when you’re most sensitive to it, you could miss it happening, or even fail to have the honesty to admit that your actions or inactions came from a place of bias. Sometimes, you flat out can’t get it, because you are not conditioned to. And even when you make an effort to get it, you won’t get it all the time. Even if you’re some white guy who joined the Black Panthers in 2020. People who’ve been black all their lives probably can tell what racism looks or feels like more than you can. You’ve only been “black” for three years. And even in those three, you’ve still been white on the outside, like slowly thawing food. You still get to pick and choose when or when not to represent black interests. You still get to go through society as a white person. You get to be freed a bit earlier than your black co-protesters who were arrested at the same rally on the same day. Now, are there false positives? Sure. Are there times when people think it’s racism and it’s really not? Of course. But I promise you, the occurrence of that is so abysmal compared to the reality of the true positives.
But that’s a discussion for another day.
Back to our point, in storytelling, swapping out a few characters, introducing heightened stakes, or exaggerating a few scenarios could simply be a dramatic emphasis on a truthful thing—an emotionally truthful thing.
Sure, none of it is admissible in court, but that’s not what it was for.
Artistic License
Artistic license at its core can simply be minor distortions or deviations from conventions in language or grammar, or even facts, for artistic purposes. Sometimes, artistic license is taken just to ensure certain lines rhyme in any iambic manner, and other times, artistic license can also be conflated into terms like dramatic license, or narrative license.
These two cases I have mentioned are most often deployed in storytelling, which is why it seems like there’s no dull moment in, say, a show about the law. Obviously, lawyers spend a lot of time reading thousands and thousands of monotonous words to slowly build a case or craft a tight argument. But not in Suits. No. Here, they simply appear to catch an integral blindspot to build a case by simply scanning a case file for less than half a second.
Taking artistic license can help reduce lulls and dull moments in a story, helping you tell it better, faster, quicker, and tighter. Narrative license is also precisely why the forty days and forty nights of Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness are not expatiated in the Bible like a daily journal entry. You can’t share every detail of a story, especially when you’re time-constrained or have a message to pass across to an audience with an attention span, a schedule, a time budget and also, an expectation (which in the case of the Bible, is spiritual/moral exposition and in the case of this article’s subject matter, is entertainment).
There are different forms of artistic license that storytellers take to communicate a situation in a way that remains true to the essence. For instance, in the Television series Chernobyl (which was based on the very-real-life nuclear disaster that occurred after the explosion of reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in USSR Ukraine), artistic license was taken in depicting the voices and roles of many scientists into one composite character—Ulana Khomyuk (played by Emily Watson). You can read a bunch of instances of artistic license taken in the Chernobyl miniseries here. Chernobyl ended up being well received, even by affected parties. The series, although taking several creative liberties for dramatic effect—some even blatantly misleading or based on urban legend —was critically acclaimed (except by the Communists of Russia, anyway). It was seen as moving, and of course, just as every situation involving real people, was borderline disrespectful to characters villainised by the miniseries.
And that is a drama miniseries, where people are AWARE they are watching a dramatised version of events.
Comedy shows are no different—especially being sources of entertainment. Even when they are supposed to share something profound, or thought-provoking, or intellectually heavy, a comic employs a lot of artistic license to make it happen.
The best comics lie A LOT, to tell the truth
Some of you may probably be thinking, “Well, that sucks”. “If it’s not even true, then why is it supposed to be funny?”
Well, because on the surface it is true. But if you really think about it, it’s not.
And then, when you really, really think about it, you realise that it is.
And sometimes, this multi-layering is precisely what makes it deeper, and even funnier.
Sure, it’s not true in a factual, or timestamped, dated sense. But it is the encapsulation of many like-for-like situations that would’ve been harder to share without a little distortion.
Honestly, I still find it hard to believe that some people even think comedians just generally are people experiencing the most outlandish scenarios. Because then what did you think funny people were? People who are gifted at experiencing funny things?
Sure, some people insist they’ve been had. And they swear they only ever want to hear and see objective truth—even in anecdotal comedy.
But then, they fall asleep whenever they read a scientific study.
Have you ever tried reading the news without a narrative? You might believe it’s how you would love to know about the world, but from personal experience, anyway, that might be a bit dishonest. Especially since, even when you are given just raw facts to make your inference from, you still end up infusing it with your own personal perspective to make sense of it. That, in itself, fictionalises the situation in a sense.
Our love for interesting stories is the reason two news channels will report the same story with the same facts but draw two different inferences, tailored to their audience’s political leanings. Not to say that both cannot be true, but facts for humans are distorted by perspective, contextual information, and just plain bias, at times. And that’s the news. Nothing in media gets more “objective” than the news. It isn’t fiction. A forest fire is a forest fire. A war-torn region is a war-torn region. Deleted emails are deleted emails…etc.
And in case you were not aware by now, much of your news IS entertainment.
To wrap up, let’s just leave it here: comics are storytellers. Storytellers who can’t tell boring stories. To say that the best storytellers lie a lot may not be inaccurate.
However, in this case, it is irrelevant to reiterate that jokes are lies. It might also be unfairly reductive, seeing as the point of a lie is to deceive/mislead, and the point of a joke is to entertain.
In Hasan Minhaj’s case, yes, he uses jokes to make an overarching point. In the case of his anecdotes which mention the names or identities of real living people, perhaps he should have been more responsible, anticipating the possible artistic illiteracy by a common audience (It’s why I always write disclaimers). Perhaps he loves attention so much that he’s willing to lie about things to get it. Perhaps he was the kid who would fake cry when mildly hitting their shin against the furniture, just to get some attention. Perhaps he really is just a fraud. I wouldn’t know, and I’m not pretending to, seeing as I do not know him personally.
But just because a story dragged longer than it actually did in real life, or just because inventive measures were taken to put you in the time and place to appreciate the gravity of a situation, that doesn’t mean comedians like him are dishonest psychos. In fact, notably, most of his stories in his stand-up ACTUALLY happened.
I wrote this earlier in this newsletter:
To be fair, reading the article definitely gave me a broader picture on the issue. For instance, it is truly sensitive discourse when a citizen, in a culture or society as politically divided as America, shares anecdotes on racism and discrimination that turn out to not be true or largely embellished. One could truly argue that this diminishes the stories of many other true victims of these situations, and ultimately misleads society to antagonise wrongly or draw unfair conclusions.
I believe that this is largely dishonest. I believe that anybody who would discredit the plausibility of hundreds of unjust occurrences because of a joke from a career storyteller that turned out to be fiction probably had a problem caring in the first place. To any sane human, no amount of “fiction” should ever discredit a bit of truth.
Nine other things worth sharing this week:
On Friday, I saw a new standup special "Cowabunga”, by Ralph Barbosa. The brother is hilarious. You can check it out on Netflix. In this spirit of today’s newsletter, you could also go see Hasan Minhaj’s “The King’s Jester” on Netflix.
I’m actively developing a project for release sometime next year but I can’t say when yet. Just know it’s a short film, it’s satirical, and if all goes well, it might be hilarious. I wrote it a while ago and now I’m gearing up for production. I’ll put the script up on Coverfly when I have the time.
I saw this Big Think video titled, “Why do some artists become famous?” Here, physicist Albert-László Barabási essentially explains with data that the network matters more than the talent.
All this comedy talk reminded me of this book I read (but didn’t finish) a few years ago: Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer. If you want to become funnier or learn how funny works, it’s a great read.
Artist recommendation: Hannah Grace. She’s a Welsh singer-songwriter with a silky voice. She’s already been on a bunch of my playlists but I’m recommending her now because she recently released this album, which I just added to my library last week.
I also listened to Rema’s RAVAGE EP. Range.My country is at it again. I’m currently researching a report that highlights the most ridiculous high-cost, ostentatious inclusions on Nigeria’s 2023 supplementary budget. Aside from that, I am also writing a report detailing the total amount of money spent on “renovating” our Presidential State House in the last 8-9 years (spoiler: it’s in the tens of billions, and that doesn’t even include yearly maintenance costs). You can follow AF24NEWS to see the report when it drops.
This week, the algorithm picked up one of my old blog posts from my tech blog, for some reason. 7 simple macOS Apps that will 10x your productivity. You can read it here. Also, feel free to follow Folutile Writes Tech for more of that.
I read James Clear’s weekly newsletter. This was a special one. You can read it here. I intend to strive for Clear’s simplicity at some point, especially with this newsletter. Some stuff from the newsletter:
Exerting more effort doesn't help if you're on the wrong trajectory. Working harder on the wrong thing just wastes more time……
"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
— Eric HofferIn the world of technology, this week was huge.
First off, in India earlier this week, several opposition politicians and journalists said they had received notifications from Apple that their iPhones may be targeted by state-sponsored attackers attempting to "remotely compromise" their phones. This isn’t the first time spyware has been used on journalists in the region.
That occurrence placed a spotlight on the discourse concerning threats that governmental sovereignty in technology, for instance, could place on the liberties of individuals, especially dissenting ones. It also spotlights the role of consumer technology in all this.
Meanwhile, the other side of the coin is brewing in the US as President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order this week imposing new regulations on the development of artificial intelligence (AI).Amongst other things, the long-anticipated order requires private companies developing AI to share their processes with the federal government. According to the fact sheet shared by the White House, Biden is ordering, from the concerned institutions and agencies:
Development of standardised tools and tests for evaluating AI systems.
Establishment of standards and best practices for detecting AI-generated content and authenticating official content to mitigate AI-related fraud (something we spoke about last week and the week before that).
Establishment of an advanced cybersecurity program to develop AI tools to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical software.
Development of a National Security Memorandum that directs further actions on AI and security.
Development of principles and best practices to mitigate the harms and maximize the benefits of AI for workers
Production of reports on AI’s potential labour-market impacts, and study and identify options for strengthening federal support for workers facing labour disruptions.
Sustainment of the influx of highly skilled immigrants and nonimmigrants with expertise in critical areas to study, stay, and work in the United States.
Acceleration of rapid hiring of AI professionals.
It’s difficult being from a country that doesn’t take things seriously.
There you have it, folks!
See you next week, same time.