Losing Your Trauma
Hasan Minhaj’s entire comedic career was built on a foundation of Sad Tales of Growing Up as a Brown Immigrant. A recent New Yorker article by Clare Malone reveals that much (perhaps all) of these were in fact untrue or happened to other people.
It would appear that Minhaj has lost his Trauma Passport: that potent combination of trauma stories mixed in with just enough humour to seem edgy but not, you know, depressing. Every immigrant is required to carry this invisible but necessary document with them wherever they go, and it is to be whipped out whenever one’s authenticity is questioned. As I’ve written in “Your Trauma Is Your Passport” and elsewhere, trauma is the condition of entrance for anyone construed as an Other: non-white, not male, not cis, not hetero. This is especially true of the world of comedy. Recall Hannah Gadsby, who shot to fame by making trauma central to her comedy (she declared she would leave the field, but has yet to make good on her promise).
No recognisable trauma? Your trauma isn’t traumatic enough?
Make shit up.
Which is exactly what Minhaj did, dipping into the lives of others who had endured, for instance, harassment by Islamaphobic cops or even making up entire stories about the racism he endured growing up.
So far, much of the commentary on Minhaj has focused on whether or not he was justified in his fabrications—he has doggedly stuck to his claim that the “emotional truths” of the story were what mattered. As he put it, “Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth.” There’s a discussion to be had about whether or not such wholesale fabrications and lies constitute seeds of truth, and what should count as truth in comedy, or whether comedy should even be held to any standard of truth. And, really, what is Truth, after all?
Debating the matter of lies versus truth ignores a crucial fact: that all immigrant narratives are inherently fictional. They may not be lies as we understand them—untruths as far as facts are concerned—but they’re ultimately nothing but stories that rely on both our willingness to swallow tall tales of trauma and oppression and our unwillingness to be challenged about what constitutes an “immigrant story.”
Hasan Minhaj has never been a particularly funny comic, and much of what passed as comedy even in his most famous and inevitable Netflix special Patriot Act was more of the tired routines that invoke “clapter,” a term apparently invented by Seth Meyer. The word signifies the kind of routine that is very social justice-y and supposedly “speaks truth to power” but offers very little by way of actual craft in its telling and yet invokes a kind of tired response combining applause and laughter. So, most comedy these days.1Many thanks to Hena Mehta for pointing me to “clapter”
Minhaj happened to be in the right place at the right time—if disasters can be considered opportune in any way. A first-generation Indian-American raised in Davis, California, the 38-year-old came of age in a post 9/11 world. His career flourished when every liberal-to-left-leaning cultural production decided it only existed to provide a counterpoint to the presidency of Donald Trump (actual and necessary political resistance was harder to sustain, so we took to cheap mockery: the apolitical man’s weapon). Minhaj’s jokes, while never that funny, seemed absolutely hilarious because they were aimed at one of the easiest political targets in modern history: Trump, after all, is readymade for caricature (that he is himself actually a very funny man who can deliver zingers with impeccable timing is a topic for another day). In a brief writeup for Time magazine, Trevor Noah wrote about his fellow comedian, “We’ve needed Hasan’s voice since Donald Trump came down that golden escalator and turned immigrants and Muslims into his targets.”
Did we, though?
With rare exceptions, a lot of the “comedy” at the time failed to note that the problems we saw in the Trump presidency, including the systematic harassment of immigrants, was not unique to his term but had in fact been created by Democrat presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump’s presidency took a lot of people on the broad left by surprise, and the “voice” that Noah referenced was never more than snippy, crude, and cruel—mocking Trump for his looks and weight, for instance. Comedy in the years of Trump quickly devolved into witless insults and we got…Hasan Minhaj.
Like too many of the second-rate comedians that clog our feeds on Netflix and Tik Tok, Minhaj has coasted along for years on a cache of anecdotes that combine the trauma of Growing up Muslim in America with predictable political commentary that’s some version of this: Trump is evil and fat! Hahaha! Did I tell you that, growing up, I hated having my friends over because our house smelt of samosas? Trump is a tyrant! Haiti is suffering! There was that time someone called me an ugly name and my father told me to forgive them, because that is our way. His routine sounds and looks like a TED Talk that strings together Wiki entries with sad, limp chuckles that pass for jokes. On Patriot Act and Homecoming King (another Netflix special: that well is deep), he maintains a manic presence, jumping all over the stage as the screen behind him lights up in bright colours and a whirl of images and text to make up for the lack of substance in what barely passes for comedy.
Minhaj’s most famous bit, if we might call it that, is a story he first told on The Moth Radio Hour, about showing up at his white date’s house on prom night only to find a white classmate tying a corsage on her wrist: her family had decided that their family back in the Midwest might not look kindly upon an inter-racial coupling and sent the devastated Minhaj back home. Yet another story doubtless evoked gasps whenever told: the comedian received a mysterious envelope in the mail and it spilled an unknown white powder onto his young daughter, who had to be hospitalised to make sure it wasn’t anthrax. And then there’s the one about how he saw through the cover of a white FBI informant who had infiltrated his Sacramento-area mosque area in 2002: the 16-year-old Minhaj joked with the man that he (Minhaj) was about to get his pilot’s licence and, soon after, was surrounded by police who slammed him against their car.
In fact: The prom date had broken up with Minhaj days earlier, the anthrax scare simply never happened, and the FBI informant, Craig Monteilh, told the New Yorker that he had been in prison in 2002, only started working for the organisation in 2006, and had never worked in the Sacramento area.
I’m not sure which is more shocking: that Minhaj would go so far as to even imagine his toddler daughter experiencing a horrific and painful death, or that he may have compelled readers to sympathise with an FBI informant.
Minhaj was every liberal’s wet dream come true: brown, a first-generation immigrant but with a native-born edge, he was an all-American Californian who could nevertheless feed eager audiences the most predictable and comforting origin stories: of his nervousness about the smell of his childhood home, his parents’ accents, his constant desire to fit in, and yada yada yada, the poor immigrant who grew up sad and lonely.
It now turns out that all of these stories, and others, were made up, but to be fair—and this is in part what the phrase “emotional truths” is getting at—these things have happened, and will continue to happen, to many; none of these incidents are outside the realm of possibility. A novelist might be excused for taking such events and transforming them into a story, but the matter of appropriation is more complicated for comedians. In this case, Minhaj, an upper class and relatively insulated Muslim American, reaps the material benefits of having appropriated other people’s actual trauma. This is not an act of solidarity: it’s just plain, old-fashioned appropriation, a man willing to portray other people’s struggles as his own. There’s also the not insubstantial matter of him naming his prom date and providing enough details about her and her later boyfriend (who, it turns out, is also Indian American) that she could be identified and doxxed by trolls.
Ultimately, Minhaj used the stories to create a heroic narrative about him and his family. He claims that, years later, he told his father, who was gravely ill at the time (according to him so, who knows?) about what had happened on prom night and the elder Hasan’s response was that the son needed to forgive his date. It’s a beautiful ending that relies on the popular trope of The Immigrant Who Shows Us How to Be Better, and it simultaneously turns Minhaj into the hero of his tale. Look at this good Muslim, we are admonished. Be more like him.
Make shit up.
Audiences clearly love Minhaj: he’s still on the short list to become the next host of The Daily Show. Even the allegations that his Patriot Act workplace was hostile to women of colour, detailed by Sangeetha Thanapal, did little to dim his star. #MeToo has been a failure on many counts, not the least of which is that it has made people pay attention only to actual, physical sexual assault. While it is, of course, necessary to pay attention to such, the problem is that gender-based harassment and discrimination in the workplace that’s not explicitly sexual is often more widespread, but gets little attention. A toxic work environment where your women of colour are made to feel ignored and insignificant? Pfffft, if you didn’t actually touch them, it’s not serious enough. (Three women threatened a lawsuit against Netflix and the show, and the matter has been settled out of court, according to the New Yorker).
His relative lack of talent has also not been an impediment: Minhaj is nowhere as smart as Trevor Noah or John Oliver, and he has no comedic timing to speak of. Curiously lacking from his delivery is any kind of rhythm or arc, the elements that actually make any real comedy bit sing: it’s all a giant whoosh of emotions from start to finish. In Patriot Act, and in most of his stage performances, he runs maniacally from one end of the stage to the other while the giant screen behind him flashes brightly coloured images and text—all in an attempt, it seems, to distract from the lack of rhythm or craft in his own words. Periodically, he pauses with a slight grin and large, upturned brown eyes, as if to wordlessly pull people into a joke, a look calculated to make every white auntie in the room melt and give him their cookies. Meanwhile, more sceptical, cynical South Asians watching at home were reminded of all those annoying desi boys who coast along by sucking up to elders or goras (white people), and we rolled our eyes and turned him off.
The most accomplished comedians are those who turn an audience’s stereotypes to their advantage: Richard Pryor, a genius, delighted in using and reversing all expectations of trauma, and his bits continue to catch people off guard, as did the early work of Whoopi Goldberg, whose sheer brilliance as a standup artist has long been forgotten in the garbage that is The View, the talk show where she is a co-host. In mining his own supposed traumas, Minhaj was fulfilling a requirement set in stone for comedians of colour, without subverting it in any way. The unspoken injunction that he chose to obey is as clear as if it was telegraphed via cue cards: Show us your sad, sad trauma or we won’t laugh at any of your jokes.
In the process, audiences and critics ignored the warning signs that things were not what they seemed. A few simple googled inquiries would have exposed most of his truth-stretching. Consider, for instance, Minhaj’s constant refrain of how his parents were immigrants from a “village” named Aligarh—one of his most popular bits is about his Indian family’s delight with the stale Oreos he brings with him to India. This is the kind of narrative we might expect from Apu in The Simpsons: a return to humble origins, greeted as a veritable king.2For more on the problems with Apu, and a conversation between Hank Azaria (who voiced the character) and Hari Kondabolu, see this episode of the podcast Codeswitch. Many thanks to Gautham Reddy for leading me to it.
But Aligarh is not some sleepy backwater in India: it’s a vibrant city with a storied past, famous for literally centuries as a centre of learning and culture and home to some of India’s best known universities. Minhaj’s parents migrated to the United States as well-off professionals: his father was already an organic chemist and his mother left the young Hasan with her husband for most of eight years in order to finish medical school in India (something that would be unusual even in the average white family), returning only to give birth to a daughter midway. Clearly, these are highly educated and progressive people, who live in one of the more prosperous areas of the country (Davis, California). And while his father was probably strict, he was also raising a son in a still-foreign country as a single father in a majority white city: try being the opposite of everything in a culture to which you’re new and where you’re unsure about local norms. The actual facts of his upbringing raise the possibility of a more complex story that involves both class and ethnicity, but Minhaj’s rendition of his family as wide-eyed immigrants encountering western civilisation for the first time has been lapped up by both white and South Asian audiences, all of whom find different kinds of comfort in this Apu-like narrative.
The inclination to invent a trauma of un-belonging, to claim that one’s life as an immigrant was always full of every kind of hardship, spans right to left, across the political spectrum. Vivek Ramaswamy began his quest for the presidency with speeches about how his parents “came to America with nothing.” Even Fox News found his fiction unbearable and revealed that he was in fact a child of wealthy parents who sent him to private school. The gender performer Alok Vaid-Menon has crafted an entire career based on stigma and alterity and has often spoken about being a sad, brown child growing up in a small town in Texas. But left out of this dominant story, or at least de-emphasised, is that both their parents are highly educated academics and researchers, and that Vaid-Menon has both a BA and an MA from Stanford University. Their aunt was the late and well-connected New York-based lesbian activist Urvashi Vaid whose partner is the lesbian comic Kate Clinton. All three—Ramaswamy, Vaid-Menon, and Minhaj—obscure their class origins in favour of narratives about immigrant displacement, without which they would not be able to elicit any sympathy.
It’s Apu all the way.
Your Life Is Fiction
In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, the Jewish Alvy Singer (Allen) is at Easter dinner with his lover Annie (Diane Keaton) and her Christian family. He is trying, gamely, to enjoy the ham. It’s clear that Annie’s conservative Grammy Hall (Helen Ludlam) can’t bear the very sight of Singer at the table and, at one point, she looks over at him in disgust. Allen, as the director, gives us her point of view: gone is the dorky man in a plaid shirt and blazer, and in his place is a Hasidic Jew. Hasidic Jews are not necessarily immigrants, but in the eyes of Grammy Hall, they are irrevocably Foreign.
Every immigrant has seen that look, or at least run into some kind of cultural stereotype, and realised, Oh, so that’s how you see me. You might be a young woman who travels the world and creates nude self-portraits for an art school assignment, but your white friend of a decade will, out of the blue, insist that she can’t possibly tell you a risqué story because it could offend your modesty and delicate sensibility and suddenly, you see yourself as she sees you: in a modest long-sleeved and high-necked gown, eyes cast down, cheeks burning in shame and shock at the very idea of oh, heavens, sexual details. You might be a queer woman who writes vigorously and openly about her queer life and desires and one day you make a casual comment about your family and a white woman in your circles turns to you, eyes wide with eagerness, Do your parents have a problem with your queerness? A simple no, and her face dissolves in a combination of petulance and disappointment. Why can’t you give me something I might understand and relate to? Where is your trauma?
Immigrants and all Others find themselves relentlessly fictionalised in such ways, and this impulse to only see people as stock characters rather than people has an effect in many worlds, including that of actual fiction. Sally Rooney’s novels, about contemporary, young Dubliners in modern Dublin, are incomprehensible to some of her most furious critics who need Irish stories to be some combination of Angela’s Ashes and Riders to the Sea (fortunately, their fury has not impeded her deserved popularity).
Minhaj’s immigrant stories worked as well as they did because of that fictional quality, because they brought the comfort of long-understood narratives about What It Must Be Like To Be An Immigrant. Audiences respond instinctively only to the stories that bear the imprint of recognisable narratives—even when they strain credulity or are thin from over-use.
Recently, I had to read a couple of books about non-American identity for a forthcoming project. The first was a novel about growing up in another country as an Other, the second a memoir about migrating to the U.S. from the same country.3I’ve deliberately left out details about the books since both are debut works, and I’m sympathetic to the pressures the authors must have faced while writing. The blurbs are also made up Strikingly, despite the difference in genre, the two books were similar in the fictionality of the experiences it recorded—and in their staleness. The novel instinctively reminded me of the slew of indifferently produced and now mostly forgotten postcolonial novels of the 1990s (often products of the Iowa MFA program), with its usual tropes about growing up alone and alien and alterity. The second was equally trite, treading the well-worn paths of families of birth and the ones we choose, and what it means to belong and not belong at the same time. In each, there were flights and travels and journeys, real and metaphorical. The blurbs read like they had been manufactured in a factory and deployed the usual words and phrases, such as: “A work of startling originality…a searing yet lyrical tale…lays bare layers of human complexity…reveals the humanity that is at the core of all our experiences…”
What further united the two was that each was indescribably boring: I had to chew on my arm in a persistent, gnawing fashion to stay awake and finish them. Neither was badly written—in fact, what saddened me most about the books, besides the pain in my arm, was that each was written by a good writer forced to produce a bad book. It wasn’t hard to see the telltale signs of editors forcing them to forego complexity in favour of stock characters (even when real) and plots (even when describing actual events). Here and there, you could see that there had been a real struggle over what to include and what to leave out: a passage about capitalism in the nonfiction work was clearly something the author had wanted, but it lay there unassimilated into the larger work, like a solid brown turd at the bottom of a clear blue swimming pool. In each book, a sense of exhaustion set in early on, as if even the author was tired of having to repeat, almost by rote, every other work about the central experience that the unoriginal protagonist (both the fictional and the real one) was going through.
And, of course, each book was laced through and through with trauma of all sorts: even birth was traumatic, adolescence was dreadful, adulthood seemed hopeless.
It’s not that there’s no place in publishing for more complex stories, but that both readers and publishers have convinced themselves that an Other without a Tale of Trauma literally does not deserve to exist. As a result, the line between fiction and nonfiction, as far as books about the “immigrant experience” are concerned, is now meaningless: all of them have to hew to narrative conventions.
For non-white people in particular, trauma passports have become legal tender in publishing, the only currency accepted in most quarters. Is it any wonder that Hasan Minhaj was as successful as he was, mining fake trauma tales while hypnotising gullible audiences with those tear-rimmed brown eyes?
But how did we get here? After all, it’s not just brown comedians who are guided by the lodestar of trauma: everywhere we look, all kinds of people are forced to insert trauma narratives into their narratives of who they are and why they deserve the most basic rights.
In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan writes about her belief that, in a growing sea of anti-trans sentiment and legislation, “knowing” someone trans might change the minds of people otherwise inclined to not care about or actively work against trans rights.
But would that really be the case? Boylan uses abortion as an example:
Knowing a person who has had an abortion — just like knowing someone who is trans — can change Americans’ opinions about it. Only 50 percent of people who say they don’t know anyone who’s had an abortion think it should be legal in most, or all, cases, but 69 percent of people who say they have an “acquaintance” who’s had an abortion think it should be legal in most, or all cases — and that number increases to 78 percent among those with a “close friend” who’s had one.
These numbers echo attitudes toward trans people, too: Only about 33 percent of Americans who say they’ve never known anyone trans believe that gender can be different from the sex assigned at birth. But among people who do know a trans person, that number jumps to more than half — 54 percent.
This sounds lovely, and so easy: just make sure that more people “know” more trans people!
But as far as policy-making goes, it is an utterly useless strategy. Consider that we have had nothing but stories about abortion for decades now, and then consider how much worse off we are in terms of abortion rights. Knowing people who have had abortions and/or who are trans might make individuals more likely to be sympathetic to them, but is sympathy conducive to policy and legal changes?
Much more importantly, why pin our hopes on whether or not people understand who we are instead of simply demanding rights based on the simple fact that we want them?
We don’t demand that people have known slaves, for instance, to insist that they should be opposed to slavery, or that they have children in their lives in order to understand that child labour is horrible and monstrous and must never be allowed. The problem with American politics in particular, even on its tenuous, fragile left, is that it relies so much on the idea that we must know the people who are struggling the most in order for us to be willing to confer even basic rights upon them. Boylan’s approach, which is common among many—the demand that we create ways for people to know the marginalised—puts an enormous onus on those we might call the Knowables. Boylan is confident that simply knowing more trans people will make the general population more willing to support trans rights but this requires that trans individuals be, first, reduced to their transness as the sum of their beings. It also requires that all trans people also be good, kind, and loveable—and the definition of those qualities is entirely subjective. And, really, why? This demand for perfect characters is also true of the search for abortion and its stories—over and over, pro-abortion advocates emphasise the goodness and even the sadness of those who seek abortion, quietly shutting out, for instance, the voices of women who have stridently and boldly declared that, why, yes, they did in fact have abortions because they simply did not want more children.
The rallying call in all social justice organising these days is some version of “Can you imagine what it’s like to be X?” That approach does the opposite of creating a space where any kind of X can exist however they wish to be: assholes who also happen to be trans, perhaps, women who’ve had abortions who simply detest children, perhaps, or psychotic immigrants who go so far as to lie about their children nearly dying horrible, painful deaths. Perhaps.
As for the moral high ground we ascribe to those who force the marginalised to spew their stories of trauma: do we really want to spend our time changing the minds of those who don’t already understand why trans and abortion rights matter? Who don’t believe that, yes, actually, immigrants have a right to safety, food, and housing without begging for them? Or should we not, instead, focus our energy towards making a world where the question is not who deserves rights but, rather, how do we make sure that people have what they need? As I’ve asked, in “A Manifesto,” what do people need, and how do we get them what they need, without demands about their characters or that they first perform their native dances and speak to us of cumin-scented dishes and the smell of Jasmine in their grandmothers’ hair?
Punks Rule
There is, of course, always a place for immigrant narratives, stories, anecdotes. I think often about my friend J. who migrated with her parents, at the age of fifteen, from Kolkata, India to Frankston, a town an hour from Melbourne, Australia. She had no siblings, and her parents worked round the clock: this is a situation that warrants the question, Can you imagine what this was like? It was unbelievably difficult, as the only brown face in a hostile environment, facing an entirely new world at a particularly sensitive age (recall, if you will, what it was like to be fifteen, anywhere in the world).
But J. found herself with an unexpected group of friends who, even as white teens, saw what she was going through, and quickly formed a protective ring around her: all the punks drew her close to them, loved her, took care of her, became friends with her family, fell in love with the food they could only find at her home and are, to this day, among her closest beloveds.
There isn’t really a way to render the complexity of this story with all the attention and care it requires, and there’s really only one lesson to be learned from it: Punk teens rule.
J’s story is among many such experiences all around this country and the world, but they don’t translate in the same way as Minhaj’s patently fictional traumas or provide those arcs of redemption (as with his father essentially granting forgiveness to white America). They don’t teach us morals and they can’t be repeated in that smug and self-satisfied way that Minhaj delivers all his Tall Tales.
The point is not that stories about immigration, trans identity, and abortions cannot be told. The problem is that storytelling about identity is inevitably weaponised as a tool with which to separate the good and deserving from the bad and undeserving, and it compels people to relive or create traumas by which they must forever define themselves. Immigrants and, indeed, anyone defined as an Other, have, like Scheherzade, been held hostage to storytelling for too long.
The problem is not that we don’t have trauma stories to help us understand what oppression looks like; the problem is that we need to end the systems of oppression that generate and create trauma in the first place.
What if we ended this demand for trauma, once and for all? What calamities might befall us if we freed immigrants and others from the constant burden of repeating their traumas?
We might see a vastly improved field of comedy, where comedians actually have to be funny. Hannah Gadsby, as unfunny as Minhaj, built an entire career out of traauummmaaa, as she called it, and it has taken a few years and a lacklustre, badly reviewed “art show” on Picasso for the world to discover that there’s no substance to all her talk. Gadsby was given an entire museum show in which to expand upon her sneering dismissal of Pablo Picasso (the centre of her Netflix show Nanette), at a major venue, and was yet unable to deliver more than the visual equivalent of her trademark sneer, by way of sarcastic quips posted here and there on the walls.
In the meantime, at least for now, Hasan Minhaj will be fine: he may yet be given that coveted Daily Show spot. He has very little talent, but is a shapeshifter and could easily end up as some kind of Comic Influencer. And while he may have lost his Trauma Passport, he can easily create new ones and more believable ones. The real task ahead of Minhaj is, for him, an impossible one: he will have to learn how to be funny.
Update: On October 26, Minhaj posted a video that claims to debunk the New Yorker’s story. I wrote a response to the video, “Hasan Minhaj and the Curious Case of the Everlasting Untruths.”
Yasmin Nair has been writing about trauma for several years, and some of her work on the subject can be found here and has appeared in Current Affairs under her own name. It has also appeared under various pseudonyms in publications like the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and in corners of Substack.
Many thanks to @TeaKaGee for directing me to the Minhaj story in the first place.
For further reading:
“Hasan Minhaj and the Curious Case of the Everlasting Untruths.”
“Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship.”
“An Interview with Yasmin Nair, Part Two: The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma.”
“The Perils of Trauma Feminism.”
“A Manifesto.”
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.
