Hasan Minhaj: Fabulist, Journalist, or Just a Guy Who’s Really Good At His Job?
There is no question that Jon Stewart forged a new model of comedian when he took over The Daily Show… the first time. Much has been written about that new model, but the arc of souring on that model has reached a new low with the recent New Yorker piece demolishing what Hasan Minhaj has worked so very painstakingly hard to build.
The accusation comes in a piece published in The New Yorker, which as a magazine and editorial voice is itself a blend of fiction and nonfiction and therefore could have a more sophisticated understanding to bring to distinguishing between the formats of stand-up and satirical political reporting.
One of Minhaj’s earliest stand-up bits that went mainstream involves being rejected by a white female peer in high school and her family — with a bitter knife twist of prejudice in the mix. This is one of the anecdotes that he admits to having exaggerated for laughs. The extent of the exaggeration is misleadingly distorted by Clare Malone in The New Yorker, as Minhaj makes abundantly clear — with plenty of supporting evidence in his video response to the piece.
And there is the news from Variety that this article likely cost Minhaj the permanent host position at The Daily Show, which went back to Jon Stewart instead of being able to forge ahead with a socially and politically progressive pick that was its hard-won laurel to bear (I would have been delighted if they had picked Leslie Jones as well, but Hasan Minhaj has done incredible work with The Patriot Act).
One of the depressingly common contextual threads that accompanies these takedowns is discrimination against women and minorities in the workplace. I remember when Jon Stewart himself faced those same charges and the rigid anger with which he denied it. (Here is his response after he was out of the chair and had time to think about it.)
Today, Hasan Minhaj faces a bit of the same with his now-ended show The Patriot Act, along with some bad-tempered nastiness from a former staffer or two about his taking the moral high ground on the show (Taking the moral high ground against extremist dictators? Is this really some sort of holier-than-thou position to take that deserves to be complained about?).
Over and over again, we have to watch people who can’t bear diverse voices to join the mainstream discussion except in supporting character roles casually fling accusations about until we just revert to the old ways and voices because it’s just easier. This is why we end up with Jon Stewart back in the hosting chair and a bitter Minhaj at a recent stand up show cracking a joke about fact-checking, summing it up with the low blow “The most dangerous organization in the world is not the CIA, it's not the IDF, it's a white woman with a keyboard.”
The fact is, Minhaj won acclaim by speaking truth to power in a comedic voice and a person who happens to share attributes with one of the targets of that voice is who wrote the piece that did him in.
I don’t like that he said the most dangerous organization in the world is a white woman with a keyboard. I don’t like it at all. But I understand it. (Especially after getting a taste of Malone’s interviewing style on record from Minhaj’s files in his video response.) And I see the seed of truth that lies within it. Because, for example why is Leslie Jones unsuccessfully vying for the host role and not writing the hit piece? To my mind, because she is on the same side of the fence as Minhaj, while Malone is definitively on the other side. But this is only in a professional sense, mind you, in that she has her position at The New Yorker, a bastion of elite journalism if there ever was one.
Clare Malone, over to you to explain your side, not as a responsible journalist arbitrating the truth, but as a storyteller, and why you chose to tell this particular story, out of all the possible stories you could tell, with utter inflexibility as to your original thesis, and with no corroborating data about other comedians and the ratio of fact to fiction in their storytelling to support your thesis that Minhaj is an outlier who invents his central narratives. And a small suggestion from me that maybe next time you could more constructively profile Leslie Jones, and position her as a viable winner of the coveted TDS permanent host spot. Or any number of other comedians vying for the role.
FWIW, I reposted your article “Is The Media Ready for An Extinction-Level Event?”. Not only that, but I think it would be fair to point out a certain misogyny that underlies the industry (For example, why is Pitchfork being folded into GQ?) in this particular piece of reporting, and yet I can also imagine that such a point of view would be well and truly shut down by any editors before it could see even the barest hint of a sunrise.
(Also, with the supposedly unprecedented amounts of data now available about every aspect of our lives, why does Ryan Broderick tweet “Everything we know about Gen Z media consumption points to it being more niche” as if that’s a meaningful or novel insight? That’s ultra ultra basic. We’ve known that about young audiences for two decades. If you track it back to what we know about subcultures, we’ve know that since the seventies. If you track it back to basic humanity and what it means to be alive, we’ve known that since the invention of the printing press. Are we just going to keep recycling this forever and pretend it’s an insight worth paying for? Pretend it’s a data-driven world, people. Do I sound like Fran Liebowitz yet?)
Tangents aside, I suggest that if you made it this far through my lament, please take the time (21 min 09 sec) to watch Minhaj’s video response to the piece, and for a little more on the fallout, here’s NPR’s bit of follow up reporting. In the end, if you do nothing else except read The New Yorker article and watch Minhaj’s follow up response, I think you’ll agree: Minhaj is not a scheming fabulist, or a morally compromised journalist. He’s just a guy with low sperm motility who’s really good at his job.
