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Did comedian Hasan Minhaj 'fake Islamphobia'?
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  • Did comedian Hasan Minhaj 'fake Islamphobia'?

Did comedian Hasan Minhaj 'fake Islamphobia'?

FP Explainers • October 27, 2023, 19:47:00 IST
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A month after a New Yorker profile accused Hasan Minhaj of exaggerating or outright fabricating the stories he tells in his stand-up act, the comedian has responded with his perspective. Here’s what he said

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Did comedian Hasan Minhaj 'fake Islamphobia'?

Hasan Minhaj, who was the subject of an unflattering New Yorker piece in September, has finally broken his silence. The comedian has released a 20-minute video to The Hollywood Reporter a month after he was accused of exaggerating or outright fabricating the stories he tells in his stand-up act. The outlet quoted Minhaj as saying, “There were omissions and factual errors in The New Yorker article that misrepresented my life story, so I wanted to give people the context and materials I provided The New Yorker with full transparency.” But what happened exactly? What happened? The New Yorker in a piece entitled Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths’ noted how the comedian heavily mines his own experiences as a Muslim and Asian American for his stand-up act. The piece claimed Minhaj acknowledged that several anecdotes he recounted in his Netflix specials were untrue but that he stood by his act regardless. The piece highlighted a few stories that Minhaj told including being rejected for prom by a friend because he was ‘too brown’, the story of an FBI informant who infiltrated the mosque his family attended when he was in high school and a letter being sent to his home filled with white powder – which spilled onto his infant daughter. The New Yorker article quoted Minhaj as saying that the tales of the FBI informant and that of the white powder, while being made up, were based on ‘emotional truths’. “Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth,” Minhaj was quoted as saying. “My comedy Arnold Palmer is seventy per cent emotional truth—this happened—and then thirty per cent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.”

The story has cast a shadow over Minhaj.

Prior to the New Yorker piece, the comedian was reportedly in the running to be the permanent host of the Daily Show. He has since been told that he is not getting the job recently vacated by Trevor Noah. Meanwhile, his fellow comedian and talk show host Bill Maher, on his show Real Time With Bill Maher, skewered Minhaj. “The stories Mr Minhaj tells in his act to elicit sympathy for himself as a Muslim and a person of colour are completely made up,” Maher said. How has Minhaj responded? Minhaj began by apologising to anyone who felt ‘betrayed or hurt’ by his stand-up. “I just want to say to anyone who felt betrayed or hurt by my stand-up, I am sorry. I made artistic choices to express myself and drive home larger issues affecting me and my community, and I feel horrible that I let people down,” Minhaj said. “And the reason I feel horrible is because I’m not a psycho. But this New Yorker article definitely made me look like one.” “So I’m going to do the most Hasan Minhaj thing ever: I’m going to do a deep dive on my own scandal, with graphics, because there is so much evidence I gave the New Yorker that they ignored that I want to show you.” “It was so needlessly misleading, not just about my stand-up, but also about me as a person. The truth is, racism, FBI surveillance and the threats to my family happened,” Minhaj said.

Minhaj began by addressing the prom story he told in his stand-up special Homecoming King.

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In it, he spoke of a white girl named ‘Bethany Reed’ whom he asked to prom – only for him to turn up at her doorstep and be told by her mother that she would not be accompanying him because the family did not want pictures of ‘Bethany’ with a brown boy. “Bethany’s mom really did say that — it was just a few days before prom,” Minhaj said in the video. “I created the doorstep scene to drop the audience into the feeling of that moment, which I told the reporter.” Minhaj then played audio of his conversation writer Clare Malone detailing the scene. “My team and I repeatedly tried to give them the emails you just saw. We confirmed the emails were sent to the reporter and their fact-checker before the article came out,” Minhaj says. “ They knew my rejection was due to race. I confirmed it on the record and provided corroborating evidence. And yet they misled readers by excluding all of that and splicing two different quotes together to leave you thinking that I made up a racist incident.” While The New Yorker story accused Minhaj of ‘shrugging off’ the woman’s worry about people finding out who she is, the comedian gives friendly texts and emails from ‘Bethany’ and notes that he gave her a pseudonym on stage to protect her. As per NPR, Minhaj admitted to ‘embellishing’ the stories about law enforcement and the white powder. On the former, Minhaj, without going into detail, said he had ‘altercations with undercover law enforcement’ while growing up. Minhaj further added that he is sorry for adding to a scenario where false stories about police excess can undermine real stories. Regarding the white powder story, Minhaj said he and his wife decided to keep the incident under wraps for fear Netflix would cancel the show. “I am sorry for embellishing the story, if anyone was worrying about me and my family,” Minhaj added. As per NPR, Minhaj in his new video does not address exaggerating two stories – him meeting with Saudi officials in the Washington DC Embassy amid news of the death of Jamal Khashoggi and Jared Kushner at a gala sitting in a seat kept empty for imprisoned Saudi activists.

Minhaj also tries to distinguish between his stand-up act and his work as a host on The Daily Show and Patriot Act.

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“I thought I had two different expectations built into my work: my work as a storytelling comedian and my work as a political comedian, where facts always come first,” he says. “That is why the fact-checking on Patriot Act was extremely rigorous. The fact-checking in my congressional testimony, deeply rigorous. … But in my work as a storytelling comedian, I assumed the lines between truth and fiction were allowed to be a bit more blurry.” “And I totally get why a journalist would be interested where that line sits,” he added. “I just wish the reporter had been more interested in their own premise. Someone genuinely curious about truth in stand-up 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. They wouldn’t just cherry-pick a few stories.” But the New Yorker is not backing down. It said in a statement, “Hasan Minhaj confirms in this video that he selectively presents information and embellishes to make a point: exactly what we reported. Our piece, which includes Minhaj’s perspective at length, was carefully reported and fact-checked. It is based on interviews with more than twenty people, including former Patriot Act and Daily Show staffers; members of Minhaj’s security team; and people who have been the subject of his standup work, including the former F.B.I. informant “Brother Eric” and the woman at the center of his prom-rejection story. We stand by our story.”

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