PRELUDE: HERE WE GO AGAIN
This is about Hasan Minhaj’s recent video in response to Claire Malone’s exposé, “Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths.’” If you need to refresh your memory or just understand the initial controversy, you should read my previous essay, “On Hasan Minhaj, Trauma Passports, and Immigrant Fictions.” This new work was supposed to take a day, maybe two—I thought it wouldn’t take too long and that it would be up on the 31st, as part of my fortnightly routine, given that I knew so much about the issues. But Minhaj’s video, “My Response to the New Yorker Article,” proved to be much more convoluted and manipulative than I had imagined, and watching it, over and over, while re-reading Malone’s, work led me down several new rabbit holes, including, for instance, his appearance on Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF.
As you’ll see below, Minhaj’s rebuttals are mostly magicians’ tricks: he denies nothing but makes other claims that prove distracting enough to convince a viewer that Great Wrongs Have Been Done. In my analysis of this new text, I wanted to approach a topic that few writers will take on: the work of journalism, as represented by Malone’s investigation. Many writers and academics—the sort who want only to be published in, say, the New Yorker, despise being referred to as journalists. They’re fine with being named as op-ed writers or public intellectuals in, say, the New York Times, but if you dare to call their work “journalism” they will recoil, hissing and spitting all the while, because they see it as a lesser occupation, a place for unlearned hacks who need to write and think in short paragraphs.
I’ve never understood this disdain: You can’t be a good writer if you’re not a good journalist who knows how to approach real people in the real world and engage with them as neither sycophants nor performative gotcha artists. A good journalist is like a good academic, following a path of inquiry to see where it will go without predetermining the outcome. The public at large has never really been clear about what is involved in the work of journalism, and for that the field itself has mostly itself to blame. The New York Times operates more like a blog—try to grasp what the actual news of the day might be on that site, and you’ll find that it’s a bit like trying to hold on to very slippery fish in a barrel full of slime as articles appear and disappear based not on relevance but on the number of readers clicking on links (the “Today’s Paper” section is generally useless). The British Guardian is a graveyard of opinion pieces that fade in signficance every week. In this context, readers think of journalists as bloggers or Substackers, and have little sense of the labour that’s involved in journalism—work that’s usually unseen and where a single paragraph might represent many hours. Too many readers can’t distinguish between genres and will read op-eds as reporting and vice versa. Or they read reports about events that happened as endorsements of the people and politics expressed by actors in a story. It doesn’t help that performative “journalists” like Rachel Maddow engage in theatrical “takedowns” that are actually written by teams of writers and researchers behind the scenes. And it doesn’t help that mainstream journalism tends to worship such figures as exemplars.
Minhaj exploits this general lack of understanding of journalism and claims, often, that Malone failed as a journalist, by framing routine journalistic inquiry as somehow part of a larger malevolent scheme on the part of the New Yorker. As we’ll see, he plays decontextualised audio clips of Malone asking questions to imply that she had a secret agenda against him and in favour of, for instance, an FBI informant. He also seems to be under the impression that her job was to faithfully take him at his word and simply repeat everything he said in her article. As we’ll see, Minhaj quietly avoids questions about his own journalistic work, including doubts about his fidelity to the facts.
The New Yorker is hardly perfect and unimpeachable (I’m one of its many and frequently irritated subscribers) and it is, in the makeup of its staff and coverage, blindingly white and often deeply elitist, like much of the publishing world. But Minhaj’s video isn’t really a substantial critique of any of that and, instead, relies on generating anger and ire at a journalist on social media and from people who have either not read the article or have forgotten what it really said.
If there are any updates to this story—if, for instance, any of those involved post new public statements—I’ll insert explanatory updates, and make sure they’re marked as such. Transcripts of audio segments below may have been edited for clarity (as when voices overlap) but not to change the meaning.
Journalism is not in the best state it could be, and it can and should be critiqued often, for many reasons. Those reasons should be based on facts, not the frenzied misreadings of social media trolls stoked by a deeply manipulative celebrity and his team. There needs to be a detailed examination of what is, in essence, a public relations video disguised as truth-telling. Here, therefore, is “Hasan Minhaj and the Curious Case of the Everlasting Untruths.”
IN THE BEGINNING, AND THEN ON AND ON AND ON
In September, the New Yorker published “Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths’,”Claire Malone’s exposé of Hasan Minhaj. It revealed that most of the anecdotes used by the comedian in his various Netflix specials and stand up routines were in fact untrue. They included a story about his long ago teenage self on prom night: Minhaj excitedly showed up at his date’s doorstep only to see another classmate, a white boy, tying a corsage on her wrist—even though she had, according to him, been the one to ask Minhaj out. Her mother showed up at the door and informed him that their relatives “back home” in another, more conservative state (Minhaj is a Californian, born in Davis) wouldn’t like seeing their daughter (whom Minhaj refers to as “Bethany Reed,” apparently a pseudonym) in photos with a brown boy. This, it turns out, never happened: Bethany told Malone that she had in fact “turned down Minhaj, who was then a close friend, in person, days before the dance.” Minhaj acknowledged this was true. She also claimed that he had revealed her real name, resulting in years of online harassment of her and her family.
In another tale, Minhaj claimed that he had seen through the disguise of an FBI informant, “Brother Eric” (whose real name was Craig Monteilh), who had infiltrated his local mosque when the comedian was still a teen. Minhaj joked with Brother Eric that he wanted to get his pilot’s licence (this was after 9/11) and found himself slammed against the hood of a car by local police. Yet another story was perhaps the most shocking: Minhaj claimed that he received, in 2019, a mysterious envelope that spilled a white powder all over his infant daughter who had to be rushed to the emergency room and kept under observation for hours to make sure it wasn’t anthrax (it wasn’t). This never happened.
The backlash against Minhaj was swift. It appears that he may have lost the possibility of becoming the next host of The Daily Show, for which he had reportedly been a top contender. I was among those who wrote about the matter, in “Hasan Minhaj, Trauma Passports, and Immigrant Fictions,” where I argued that the comedian, while presenting himself as a brave new champion of the dispossessed, had coasted along on and fed cultural expectations about sad, tragic immigrants.
Now, a month later, Minhaj has issued a 21-minute video, “My Response to the New Yorker Article,” where he sets out to prove—with screenshots of emails and audio recordings of the original interview with Malone—that the magazine manipulated his words and concealed information. Minhaj asserts that the magazine has deliberately misrepresented him and made him seem like a “psycho,” that it “implied that race wasn’t a factor in my rejection” (by Bethany) and he seems to show evidence that Malone manipulated his words. He also claims, with copies of old emails, that even Bethany acknowledged that he had protected her privacy. In response, the New Yorker issued a brief statement, saying, “We stand by our story” and that it had fact-checked the piece and spoken to over twenty people in the course of the reporting.
In his shows, Minhaj’s general style has been to embody a manic energy, running from one end of the stage to another while graphics explode on the screen behind him. In “My Response,” Minhaj is seated calmly behind a brown desk, against a beige wall, while graphics of screenshots play above his shoulder. Wearing a light blue and lavender sweater, Minhaj adopts the posture and style of a wise professor, looking into the camera with a diffident, trust-me-would-I-lie gaze, using his hands and arms in a measured way to emphasise his points. With all the graphics and audio in plain sight and sound, Minhaj makes it look like he has dismantled every word in “Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths’” and shredded the credibility of a storied magazine.
In fact, there’s very little in “My Response” to suggest that anyone who believed the New Yorker story should now believe Minhaj. A careful viewer will note that he denies nothing, and admits that all the stories were made up—but carefully reframes each story to make it seem like Malone failed as a journalist. In an excellent and detailed point by point analysis, Slate’s Nadira Goffe writes, “Almost everything the New Yorker article alleges appears to line up with Minhaj’s version of the facts, except for some of the details of the prom date story.” As Michael Schulman (a colleague of Malone at the New Yorker) puts it, “That’s how crisis PR works: it changes the conversation,” adding that Minhaj’s response amounts to spin, not critique.
I concur with Goffe and Schulman, and would add that, except for a few details about the prom date, the video is simply a dramatic reenactment of the New Yorker piece. (I do recommend that people read Goffe’s response, and these threads by Nithin Pahwa, also of Slate, and by Schulman.) The narrative is little more than sleight of hand, a shell game designed to distract the viewer with what seems like a host of “evidence” about the New Yorker’s supposed untruths but which reaffirms everything Malone already recounted. The video is only credible if you believe that the New Yorker story was written to dispute the idea that Minhaj never experienced racism or to assert that racism was irrelevant. At one point, Minhaj angrily asserts that he was “accused of faking racism.” But that is not the issue at the heart of the exposé whose leading question is, as Malone put it, in reference to his two most popular stories, “Does it matter that neither of those things really happened to Minhaj?”
To believe that Minhaj has debunked Malone’s work requires readers to have read an entirely different article. “My Response” also requires that they believe that journalism is an embodiment of social justice ideas, where a writer shows up for a friendly chat with a subject whose politics they want to cover as favourably as possible. But journalists are required to ask hard questions, even if they seem either intrusive or inflammatory or seemingly opposed to the subject being interviewed—and without fear of their words being flung around the internet in decontextualised clips. As we’ll see, Minhaj’s video presents routine questions posed by Malone in her role as a journalist as inherently duplicitous, as if she was duty-bound to only follow a thread that presented him in the most favourable light.
If anything, “My Response” reveals that his body of work is even more troubling than we might have understood before the New Yorker article, because it compels us to look anew at the stories he presented in specials like The King’s Jester and the series Patriot Act. A return to these reveals that audiences and critics may have ignored several red flags and odd details that are now made clearer within his new explanatory narrative, including his persistent exploitation of the dead or deeply marginalised. The odd details are tiny but, as we’ll see, they indicate that even the explanations of fabrications involve…further fabrications. Placed alongside the new video, we see the very damning parts of Malone’s investigation that Minhaj ignores in his explanation, such as the charges of gendered and sexual harassment behind the scenes at Patriot Act. Minhaj boasts about how well his work was fact checked unlike, according to him, the New Yorker article, but ignores Malone’s revelations: fact checkers at Patriot Act “felt that Minhaj could be dismissive of the fact-checking process” going so far as to compel the female team of researchers to leave the writers’ room.
A significant number of women working behind the scenes on Patriot Act (mostly women of colour, as Sangeetha Thanapal has documented here), made claims of troubling patterns of gendered harassment and discrimination and took their grievances public in 2020, on Twitter. According to a document reviewed by the magazine, three women “threatened litigation against Netflix and “Patriot Act” ’s production company, alleging gender discrimination, sex-based harassment, and retaliation.” Whether or not any or all of these allegations are true, they should have been addressed in a video that places so much emphasis on proof of bad behaviour and rebuttals. Instead, Minhaj cherry picks from Malone’s several allegations and in the process reframes the article to make it look like another one entirely. At one point, Malone quotes the comedian Marc Maron talking to Minhaj, in late 2021, about the responsibilities he might have to the subjects of his comedy. We’ll get to that section in a little while, but for now it’s worth noting that Maron also pointedly asks Minhaj about the staffers’ accusations, and Minhaj dismisses them as petty office politics that had little to do with him directly: “What’s wild is people were pissed off and I found out much later. It was specifically in regards to a couple of people, people were not getting along, in that specific department, it was in regards to people’s tone, posture, demeanour, the way they would collaborate with one another and I think that is one of the things that we are now really starting to traverse with: how do people creatively disagree with one another. There’s always going to be creative tension on collaborative teams like that.” [1:23:27 mark] Confronted directly by a fellow male comedian about accusations against his workplace, Minhaj adroitly paints the whole situation as one where “folks disagreed with one another,” as he put it, and erases the far more searing accusations made by a group of women.
To return to “My Response”: Minhaj’s first trick in the video is to make it seem like the original story wasn’t even about him, and here he doesn’t realise that he contradicts himself. He says at the start, “A reporter fact checked my standup specials and found some inaccuracies that they wanted to ask me about. So I sat down with them to explain my writing process and why I make certain creative choices in my standup.” But by the end of the video, Minhaj has twisted the scenario to make it seem like Malone had intended to write an entirely different piece. He misleads the viewer by saying, “I just wish the reporter had been more interested in their own premise. Someone genuinely curious about truth in standup wouldn’t just fact check my specials. They would fact check a bunch of specials. They would establish a control group, a baseline, to see how far outside the bounds I was in relation to others.”
Minhaj makes it seem like Malone was writing something about comedy for Nature, the reputed science magazine, complete with longitudinal studies and pie charts. But Malone didn’t interview Minhaj because she was “curious” about “truth in standup” in a general sense or a concern with the genre. She approached Minhaj because she had heard that some of the stories he, in particular, used in his work were not true.
Malone intersperses all her revelations with questions and ruminations about what, exactly, comedians might or might not owe their audiences. About the conflicting accounts about prom from Minhaj and his long ago date, she writes, in a segment that’s worth quoting at length:
What is the truth in this instance? ‘Homecoming King’ offers a broader observation about the often insidious nature of racism in American suburbs [emphasis mine]. But what duty does the storyteller have to the real person who is on the other side of his tale, whether it be a high-school crush or a felon turned F.B.I. informant? (Minhaj said that he owed nothing to Monteilh, based on his behavior toward the Muslim community.) The nature of storytelling, let alone comedic storytelling, is inventive; its primary aim is to make an impression, to amuse or to engage. But the stakes appear to change when entertainers fabricate anecdotes about current events and issues of social injustice.
And while she was not required to “establish a baseline,” Malone does in fact place Minhaj’s fabrications alongside similar exposés about other comedians and, again, it’s worth quoting her at length:
In 2015, the comedian Steve Rannazzisi, who appeared on all seven seasons of FX’s “The League,” admitted that he had lied about evacuating from the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11, narrowly escaping death when the second plane hit. In interviews, he had used the story to explain his motivation for abandoning a corporate job in Manhattan to pursue an entertainment career in Hollywood, a trajectory that would have seemed remarkable enough without any embellishment. The writer and monologuist Mike Daisey faced blowback for making up details in his story for “This American Life” about Apple’s Foxconn plant in China, but his point about poor working conditions was an important one to make. In a blog post titled “Some Thoughts After the Storm,” Daisey wrote, “When I said onstage that I had personally experienced things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract I’d established with my audiences over many years and many shows.
In other words, Malone was doing exactly what Minhaj accused her of not doing—contextualising him among other (and white) comedians in a way that demonstrates that her concern is with his work in the larger landscape of a shifting field of comedy that does use, as Minhaj admits, reporting techniques. Minhaj’s work is somewhere between the biting social commentary of George Carlin and the conventional “So something happened to me on the way here…” style of standup, and it’s also part of a relatively new genre of infotainment as seen on shows like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. In light of all that, asking a comedian why he chose to fabricate so many deeply manipulative stories, including the near and gruesome death of his own child, is hardly outside the bounds of proper journalism.
The video’s credibility also relies on the idea that Malone needs to be held liable for a stray phrase that’s presented out of context. In an audio clip, we hear Malone asking, “Is the doorstep moment true?” To which Minhaj responds, “No, no, no, but it happened before. But the emotional truth remains the same, her mom going, “Hey sweetie, we take photos, and we don’t want people to see. We have family back home in [redacted].” Malone then asks, “Did she give that as the reason, “‘My parents aren’t comfortable?’” Minhaj’s answer is “Yes, yes, yes, and it just destroyed me.” At which point, Malone responds, “Yeah, sure, that’s understandable.”
Minhaj, in his explanatory video, pounces on these last words, and declares: “The reporter said, ‘it’s understandable.’ But none of what I explicitly said makes it in the article.” Here, Minhaj is implying that the phrase “that’s understandable” indicated sympathy on the part of a journalist, an agreement with his part of the story. Later, he presents audio recordings of him and his publicity agent telling Malone that they will send over copies of email correspondence between him and Bethany that prove that she had been grateful to him for keeping her family private (to dispute her claim to Malone that she had in fact been doxxed and harassed for years when he revealed her identity during a show). But, according to Minhaj, Malone still went ahead and wrote that “The woman also said that she and her family had faced online threats and doxing for years because Minhaj had insufficiently disguised her identity, including the fact that she was engaged to an Indian American man. A source with knowledge of the production said that, during the show’s Off Broadway run, Minhaj had used a real picture of the woman and her partner, with their faces blurred, projected behind him as he told the story.”
In response to this, Minhaj again pounces on a detail and says that the Netflix show used pseudonyms and blurred their faces. But as Goffe points out, the New Yorker confirmed through a source that their identities had been revealed during an off-Broadway production, a fact that Minhaj cleverly leaves out.
That still leaves the question of Malone’s comment that “it” was “understandable” and her choosing to insert Bethany’s version of the story. This is bad journalism only if we believe that Malone was a personal friend of Minhaj chatting with him for a Substack piece and then stabbing him in the back. But, as Goffe and Pahwa have pointed out, Malone does convey that there were dual narratives and this is standard for journalists. A journalist’s job is not to keep going back and forth between people until a crystal clear version of the truth emerges for all to see and hold up in a court of law: the responsibility is to the reader, and the work is to make sure that an article presents the complexity of an issue to the fullest extent possible. Here, Minhaj sets the readers upon Malone, like a pack of hounds upon a rabbit: “The reporter said it ‘it’s understandable,’” as if those two words indict her. He also presents audio of himself and his publicist promising to send Malone the aforementioned copies of emails, and says that they confirmed the receipt of said emails—as if somehow all of this is damning evidence against the journalist. But it proves nothing except that copies were sent: Malone still had to sift through the emails and independently decide on their place in and relevance to the story.
As for complexity: Minhaj’s video is notable less for what it says and more for the damning information it leaves out, which extends even beyond the the allegations of gender and the workplace. As the New Yorker points out, Minhaj claimed, in The King’s Jester, that he had gone to the Saudi embassy in D.C to try and score an interview with Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, when the crown prince was visiting the U.S. After what he described as an unwelcoming and even hostile meeting with officials, he returned to New York to find that everyone at Netflix (they knew about his visit) was worried about him: media outlets were flooded with breaking news about the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A few days later, Netflix released the episode of Patriot Act that focused on the Saudis and Minhaj’s criticism of the murder. The comedian soon found himself feted by the national press, including Time magazine which honoured him as one of 2019’s 100 most influential people and invited him to a large celebratory dinner. According to him, Time set aside a symbolically empty seat for the imprisoned Saudi activist Loujain al-Hathloul that was then boorishly occupied by none other than Jared Kushner who came in late. Minhaj took the opportunity to slyly allude to the fact that Kushner could easily Whatsapp the crown prince and set the activist free, adding that the app’s encryption would make it impossible for anyone to know.
Except: Malone reveals that the murder of Khashoggi happened a month before Minhaj’s embassy meeting; there had been no empty seat at the dinner. A video of Minhaj’s speech shows that he never made the joke about encryption (Malone doesn’t go into this detail). He did, however, suggest the Whatsapp conversation, and his speech did go viral. When she asked about the made-up detail, Minhaj said he added it to make his “storytelling” more compelling and that the fabrication about the empty seat drove home the “emotional truth” of the moment.
Did it, really? To what end? There were any number of ways to tell the story of the embassy interview or the speech at the dinner, without what Pahwa correctly calls the “cynical” use of Jamal Khashoggi and, I would add, a helpless, imprisoned activist in Saudi Arabia. And the roast of Jared Kushner was comedic gold, without the needlessly manipulative use of a non-existent seat—given our still prevalent cultural memories of Trump being roasted by Obama in 2011, a moment said to have brought about his determination to run for the presidency. Is it really that hard to make fun of Jared Kushner?
As with the question of the threatened lawsuit by several women, Minhaj doesn’t touch this part of the New Yorker piece.
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia—as easy a target as Kushner—is brought into “My Response” more than once, and is used to explain away—in a somewhat vague and convoluted fashion—the most poignant and shocking fabrication addressed by the New Yorker: the anthrax story. The original and retold versions both include odd details and red flags.
This was the story told by Minhaj on The King’s Jester: he was returning home with his daughter in her stroller when the doorman handed him an envelope that he opened, expecting it to be fan mail. As he tells it, very dramatically, a white powder fell out of it and all over the child’s neck, shoulders, and cheeks. And then he provides an odd detail, that he rushed upstairs to get his wife—when it would have made more sense to simply get the child medical attention and call her from the hospital, or have her come downstairs as soon as possible. As he tells it, they both went to the New York University hospital and waited for hours until their daughter was cleared of danger. According to Minhaj, an investigator came out and asked, “ I’ve been in this department long enough to know this shit doesn’t just come out of nowhere. So I have to ask you something, young man: who on earth have you been antagonising?” Minhaj responded, “Everybody?”
In his video explanation of this fabrication, Minhaj admits he lied about the details but also insists that something like it did happen. He says, “I am sorry for embellishing the story or if anyone was worrying about me and my family. But let me make something clear: a letter with white powder was sent to my apartment in February of 2019. I opened it in the kitchen. Powder fell on the table and my daughter was just a few feet away. After ten seconds of freaking out, I realised it was not anthrax and that someone was fucking with me…”
But how did Hasan Minhaj, without any scientific training, come to realise that the powder was not anthrax? Anthrax, left untreated, results in a horrible death, and while it is not infectious its spores can be breathed in, as when it lands on a table and flies everywhere. Yet here, as in the original, Minhaj and his wife react in a way that seems contrary to what we might consider a normal reaction, where the parents would have melted into complete panic and rushed their child to the hospital to confirm that she was in no danger (and to be fair, what, in a crisis moment, can be considered “normal?”). Instead, he decides, on the basis of mysterious knowledge, that the powder is not anthrax.
In admitting to the falsehood, Minhaj told the New Yorker that he joked about the possibility of anthrax with his wife and never told the producers of Patriot Act about it even though they had already assigned a security detail to him amid concerns for his safety after the Saudi episode aired. In the video, he gives more details, saying that “people had been fucking with me” after Netflix pulled the Saudi episode of Patriot Act in Saudi Arabia after complaints from the regime. He and his wife were also nervous about any danger to their daughter, he claims, and that she had asked the security detail about how to attach tracking devices to the stroller. And yet, Minhaj says, “Beena and I decided to keep the anthrax scare private because we were worried that Netflix would shut down the show which would have put my entire staff out of work.”
This is yet another red flag because, surely, Netflix was already aware that the couple was under threat—it had after all assigned security guards to the family. Adding the detail about being an incredibly thoughtful boss who places his staff’s jobs above his daughter’s safety is—and there is no delicate way to put this—a ludicrous claim and, once again, places Minhaj at the centre of the story. Yet again, Minhaj’s explanation of a fabrication only makes it worse because even that is so hard to believe. Taken together, his stories—the fabricated ones and the ones he now claims are real—come together to reveal a pattern of suspicious details and red flags that indicate he’s still lying. And he does it all to amplify the image of himself as a brave hero willing to take on murderous Saudis and craven relatives of Trump, a man who places his employees’ well-being above all else, even the life of his family.
As for the matter of Monteilh: is there a bigger hero than a teen who almost single-handedly takes on an F.B.I agent? In his earlier retelling of the story, Minhaj made it seem like he had been this funny, snarky teen who saw through Monteilh’s disguise before the rest of the world. But it turns out that Monteilh had been in prison at the time of the alleged incident and has never worked in the Sacramento area. In his video, Minhaj says, “I understand why people are upset. People face real danger at the hands of the police and false stories can undermine real stories. And I am sorry I added to that problem. My intention wasn’t to take away from these stories, it was to spotlight them through my specials.” He points to the story of Hamid Hayat, highlighted in King’s Jester, who spent fourteen years of his life in prison after being falsely accused of terrorism. Minhaj explains that he created a funny story about himself (which he claims was based on some real experiences with police) because that would resonate much more with audiences and still drive home the point that the F.B.I was engaged in these covert operations that served to incarcerate men like Hayat: an abstraction was rendered more concrete. He then shows what he claims are screenshots of Hayat’s texts to him after the New Yorker story which say that he had only love for the comedian. Yet, says Minhaj, the reporter was “far more concerned about the FBI informant I talked about in the special.” He plays a clip of Malone asking him, “Did you reach out to Craig Monteilh? Do you feel you owe him anything?”
After playing the clip, Minhaj turns to the camera and says, with an amused and defiant look, “As a Muslim, am I supposed to apologise to an ex-con who tried to entrap Muslims for the FBI?” Turning away with a contemptuous look, he continues, “Yeah, maybe if he gave us a heads up, I would owe him a heads up.”
But here again, in a clip that has no other context, Malone is asking a question about process and also about the possible ethical questions surrounding Minhaj’s work. The part about Hayat affirming his love for Minhaj is perhaps poignant, but not actually relevant: Minhaj does not deny and even confirms that he lied about the FBI officer, but uses Hayat’s texts to him along with a suggestion that Malone was more solicitous about Monteilh in order to add emotional heft to his video. As with Khashoggi and al-Hathlou, Minhaj doesn’t hesitate to use the lives and words of deeply marginalised people to bolster his own case and to add to the myth making about his heroism.
In the process, he maligns Malone by implying she felt solidarity with Monteilh even though she writes, explicitly, “But what duty does the storyteller have to the real person who is on the other side of his tale, whether it be a high-school crush or a felon turned F.B.I. informant? [emphasis mine]. The point, as a journalist, is not to hew sympathetically to one side or the other but to ask, what are the ethical ramifications of all this, regardless of how we might feel about those involved? She also adds, in a parenthetical statement, that Minhaj said that he owed nothing to Monteilh, based on his behavior toward the Muslim community. Which is exactly what Minhaj says in “My Response,” once again reenacting Malone’s article, not contradicting it. Malone is placing Monteilh and Bethany on the same plane in an effort to dig into a question: “what duty does the storyteller have to the real person who is on the other side of his tale?” And as she makes clear, this is not a line of inquiry exclusive to her, but something that has been swirling around Minhaj for a while.
Here we return to the section about Minhaj’s podcast with Marc Maron, where she writes,
Maron seemed to raise the idea that, in “Homecoming King,” Minhaj had constructed an onstage emotional history that wasn’t entirely honest. “Your show was tight, it was effective, it had a message, the punch line at the end was very clever. It was good, the story was good—you lucked out with these life things and you organize them,” he said. “I’m not criticizing that. I’m just saying that there is a big difference between what you put out in the world and who you are personally.” He went on, “When you talk about your father or that woman that jilted you in high school or whatever, you’re going to have to weigh the repercussions. Either you respect them or you don’t. And then you have to balance that out. At what point is this disrespectful, and at what point do I not give a shit anymore?”
You don’t want to disrespect the person.
CUE THE SCARVES
Finally, at the end of a video that takes more turns than a plane during an Air Show, Minhaj aims squarely at Malone’s concluding sentence, claiming that she removed some necessary context around what he had actually said. Like a magician distracting the audience with a flutter of many scarves and fireworks in the background, he goes so far as to insinuate, in a tone of deep umbrage, that the New Yorker deliberately refused to be truthful with quotations: “We tried really hard, to have them put in the full quote, with full context, but they refused, so let me leave you with the full context.”
This is the audio clip that Minhaj plays:
“When people see a ‘Hasan Minhaj’ show, there’s two different expectations. There’s the ‘Hasan Minhaj’ you see, maybe here at the comedy cellar, where there is an implicit agreement between the audience like we’re going down into a basement, like we’re about to see a one hour comedy show that feels like there is an emotional roller-coaster ride. Then there’s ‘Hasan Minhaj’, the guy you’ve seen on the Daily Show as a correspondent or the guy from Patriot Act on Netflix, which is: I am not the primary character, the news story is the primary character. With the latter, the truth comes first, comedy sometimes comes second to make the infotainment the sugar on the medicine. In this [standup comedy]the emotional truth is first, the factual truth is secondary.”
Minhaj claims that the last line “ is stripped of its context to leave you with the impression that I’m some sort of unrepentant liar” and then he quotes her words, which also appear on the screen to his right, “…he told me, ‘the emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.” And yet, as Schulman points out, it’s Minhaj who, with the ellipsis, removes Malone’s words that did provide context. The full quote from the article is,
He appeared unwilling to engage with the idea that his position in the comedic landscape is unique, or that the host of a comedy news show might be held to more stringent standards of accuracy across his body of work. When it came to his stage shows, he told me, “the emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.”
Besides the fact that there is nothing here that contradicts the audio, it should also be noted that no reputable publication is going to simply insert an entire quote just because an interviewee wants it that way—this, again, is not a breach of journalistic ethics or procedure: it is actually how journalism works. Which is to say that, yet again, Minhaj removes necessary context—to make the claim that Malone took his words out of context.
WHAT REMAINS?
In sum: “My Response” does what it accuses Malone of doing, by effectively decontextualising her words and, in a sense, writing an entirely new piece. Watching Minhaj in this video is like watching an inexpert magician who doesn’t realise that his hand motions are too slow and that the secret compartment has fallen open on the side facing the audience. His arsenal of tricks—screenshots, audio clips, the deep earnestness—only works for a social media audience that is easily stoked and whose members may either never have read the essay or have forgotten its details. “My Response” works off a larger cultural ignorance about how journalism works to make it look like normal reporting procedures were part of some malevolent agenda, and it carefully sidesteps some glaring information about Minhaj’s workplace that might cast a much more negative light on him. Goffe points out that the part about Bethany Reed could have been better explained in terms of the racism—she has a point, but we could also argue that it’s up to the reader to divine all that without having to be told so explicitly. It’s also worth noting that Minhaj, who goes to great lengths to tell us of Hayat’s texts to him assuring him that he approved of his uses of his story, tells us nothing at all about whether or not he had contacted Reed about using her emails (a point also raised by Pahwa on Twitter). This, as Goffe points out in an episode of ICYMI, is also a subtle way of him stating that Bethany lied even though there’s no way of telling if Bethany in fact, over time, came to a different understanding of how Minhaj had treated her (the emails he shows us are from 2015). In Homecoming King, the special built around the prom date, Minhaj recounts a moment when he snapped back at her with sarcasm, mocking her for having contacted him about tickets to one of his shows. But his video presentation of their years-long correspondence implies a much more uncomplicated relationship
As an enforced and somewhat mythologised ritual, prom night is really little more than a Halloween parade that marks the end of sometimes or often or entirely tortuous years and brings all your neuroses—about gender, sex, sexuality, your pimples, your weight, your style, the vast expanse of life itself—into sharp focus. The lucky ones get to experience it as just another event and shrug it off and forget about it, if they even bother, but culture—or, really, capitalism and the movies it needs to make—at large insists that it’s very, very important, maybe the most important night of your life and what are you thinking with that dress, and those shoes, oh, my god, and wi. In this weighted context, it’s entirely possible that both Reed and Minhaj did in fact have “different understandings of her rejection” (which is how Malone communicated Minhaj’s sense of things). And for the same reason, it’s not accidental that Minhaj should begin with this story—even though it is in fact the very last one in the article: he knits together a tale of racism ignored with another about the horror of prom night to create an “emotional truth,” if you will, knowing full well how the two very potent narratives might resonate with viewers.
The questions for readers and viewers remain: what are we to make of this moment, why does it matter, and what do we make of representation—often derided even and especially on the left these days but still so vitally necessary?
Do we need more Hasan Minhajs, more comedians and public figures who don’t look like all those who’ve come before? Of course we do. But do we—white and otherwise—have to suffer the likes of Minhaj, who is not even that funny—just so we might see representation?
In a response to Minhaj’s video, WBEZ’s Heena Srivastava asks “How do we hold our celebrities accountable, in a world where we do not have the power to hold white celebrities to the same standards, without piling onto discrimination?” She also writes that his presence in the media landscape empowered her to enter journalism school “and wear my stories on my sleeve.” But is that necessarily a good thing? As I’ve asked so often, why are people of colour in particular always required to walk around perpetually carrying their “stories,” especially of trauma and un-belonging, for the satisfaction of mostly white audiences who still serve as gatekeepers to every industry? Why must we constantly present our trauma passports?
Do we need heroes or stories? What if we tried to understand matters like immigration, state surveillance, the grinding racism of everyday life, gender discrimination and other weighty matters without constantly requiring humans amongst us to act out their histories? What would a left critique of suffering look like if it did not require people to dramatise it for us?
And why does Srivastava, like many others, stay silent about the number of women, including women of South Asian descent, who have complained about gender-based harassment? When does diversity in representation matter and when is it quietly overlooked, and why?
This raises another and perhaps far more uncomfortable question: what if he had lied to create “emotional truths” about something like, say, rape? The fact that he made up a story that placed his own daughter at death’s door is disturbing, but would lying about sexual assault be worse? Or just as bad? Or maybe less bad but still kinda-sorta-maybe okay? Or not okay at all? Why?
What are the fine sieves through which we pass such “emotional truths?”
Author Bio: Yasmin Nair’s work on trauma and more can be found on www.yasminnair.com. She may never watch standup again.
For further reading, see:
“On Hasan Minhaj, Trauma Passports, and Immigrant Fictions.”
“The Perils of Trauma Feminism.”
“Trauma and Capitalism or, Your Trauma Story Will Kill You.”
I spoke to Karma Chavez about Trauma Feminism, here.
“AOC and the Weaponisation of Trauma.”
There’s No Rescuing the Concept of Equality: Part ONE of My Interview with Hypocrite Reader
And, really, just type “Trauma” into the search box here, or anywhere on the internet, with my name attached, to see more of my work on the subject.
Image source: Neal Brennan
This piece is not behind a paywall, but represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it, using my name and a link, should it be useful in your own work. I can, I have, and I will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work in any way. And if you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
