I was going to wrap this into my previous entry, but I feel it works better as a standalone post, so you get a double dose of me this week. Yay, you.
If you are familiar with Hasan Minhaj, you probably know why I asked the question in the title of this entry. If you are not familiar with him, I'll give you the quick skinny: He's a comedian who does a lot of standup, a little acting, and he hosted a Netflix talk show called Patriot Act for a few years. Most of his act consists of personal anecdotes, so much so that it might be more accurate to describe him as a humorous monologuist. He's a first-generation Muslim Indian-American, and a lot of his comedy is centered around the religious and racial discrimination he faces in a post-9/11 America... or doesn't. Last week, Clare Malone of The New Yorker dropped a profile piece detailing how pretty much none of the stories he tells in his show actually happened. They are either outright fabrications or exaggerated to the point that there is no meaningful difference between them and outright fabrications.
This raises some interesting ethical questions about when storytellers are allowed to lie and when they are not. Minhaj's defense of his act is that, although it might not be factually true, it's emotionally true, and comedians frequently use hyperbole for effect. Some people buy this argument, others do not. Thinking on it a bit, I've found myself very much in the latter category. I don't think it's right what Minhaj did. I think it was fraudulent at worst, and manipulative and phony at best. I agree that it's okay for comedians to make things up sometimes -- it's entertainment, after all, not a legal deposition -- but they need to ask themselves some questions and earnestly consider the answers first.
Will the audience think it's true, and will they feel let down if they learn otherwise?
This is where Minhaj's specific brand of comedy is relevant. Nobody cares if Mitch Hedberg actually has a package of Life Savers in his pocket or if Brad Williams really scared a guy away during a fight, because those are clearly just jokes -- the humor is the humor. But in Minhaj's act, a lot of the humor comes from a previously established buy-in from the audience. It's emotionally based, trust based. He makes us feel one way, and then flips it, and we laugh at that incongruity. That initial buy-in from the audience is incredibly important, and it is much more powerful if we believe what he's saying is literally true.
I really liked a lot of Minhaj's stuff. In fact, I once wrote a fawning entry about him on this blog, about a story he told on a podcast. It was very funny, but also incredibly moving and thought-provoking, and, yes, I feel let down that now I suspect it's total bullshit. There is a gravitas to something true that is much more difficult to achieve with something fictitious. And I think Minhaj's knows this, which is why he never let on that his stories weren't real, until he was exposed. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld openly say that their comedy is all a put-on, and I believe Minhaj should have done the same a long time ago.*
*I find his defense that his stories are emotionally true to be extremely weak. He sounds like Jesse Eisenberg in The Squid and the Whale saying that he could have written the Pink Floyd song he plagiarized.
I actually went through something like this in my own little way. I wrote a crossword puzzle book, in which I include a short personal anecdote with each puzzle. I very quickly learned that it is almost impossible (for me, at least) to write something compelling, concise, and totally truthful. So, I just put a disclaimer at the beginning of the book saying that my stories were not completely factual. Had Minhaj done something like this with his comedy from the get-go, this whole thing would be a complete non-issue. But he didn't. On the contrary, he reiterated accounts from his act, as if they were fact, even in non-stage settings, like interviews. It's tough to defend that.
Is your work just for entertainment or also for making broader social and political points?
Minhaj's comedy definitely falls into the latter category, and this is another reason why I think it was unethical for him to present his anecdotes as true. One can very easily see what I mean by flipping the politics. If a conservative comedian told stories on stage in the same manner as Minhaj, but they were about being mugged by immigrants or seeing drag queens perform adult material in front of children, and then when it came out that these things never happened, the comedian defended them as emotional truths, would liberals shrug and say Fair enough, it's your lived experience that really matters? Of course not. They would be decrying it as propaganda, which it would be. But then shouldn't the same standard apply to Minhaj? Or is it only wrong if somebody you don't like does it?
Are real people falsely depicted in a negative manner in your stories?
This is another reason I wanted to admit up-front in my book that the things I was saying weren't true. If you lie about other people, that seems way worse to me than lying about yourself or inventing people whole-cloth.* And Minhaj did lie about real people. He said a real FBI informant "Brother Eric" infiltrated his mosque, and it never happened, and worse, he said a girl spurned him on prom night, because her parents didn't want their daughter dating a brown boy. That also never happened -- she broke things off with him before prom night and says it was because of typically teenage shit and didn't have anything to do with her parents or his race. (She's now married to an Indian man, if that matters to you at all.) Minhaj never called her out by name, but he gives enough details about her, including showing a picture with only her face blurred, that Clare Malone didn't seem to have any trouble figuring out who she was. That's a pretty fucked up thing to do to somebody.
*I used a lot composite characters in my book so that it would be difficult for any single person to identify themselves in it.
The last thing I'll say about this is that there is a cost to be paid by others in your community when you lie about being victimized. It needlessly scares people and causes unnecessary mental anguish. This is something I wish liberals took to heart more often. How are Indian-Americans served by believing that society is more racist than it really is? It seems to me, the only real beneficiaries of Minhaj's tall tales are himself and right-wingers who say elite Hollywood liberals are obsessed with fake victimhood. This is the biggest gift they've received since Jussie Smollett.
Anyway, there's some other stuff in the article about how Minhaj didn't like the female fact-checkers* who worked for Patriot Act and would frequently ice them out of the production process, but you can read about all that if you like. I think I've said enough on this issue.
Until next time...
*They have alleged sex-based discrimination against Minaj, but now he has a really good defense: I'm not sexist; I just don't like facts!
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