Hasan Minhaj Meant Something to Brown Americans. Was It All an Act?

On Friday, New Yorker writer Clare Malone published an exposé of the renowned Indian American comedian Hasan Minhaj, laying out two startling revelations about the man who’s considered the front-runner to be the next host of The Daily Show. The first is that Minhaj, as he himself confessed to Malone, has bent the truth—to the point of just lying, some might say—when recounting personal stories in his stand-up comedy. The second, Malone reports, relates to allegations that Minhaj had fostered a hostile workplace for staffers of his former Netflix talk show, the critically acclaimed Patriot Act. The article paints a picture of Minhaj as a teller of “emotional truths,” referring to his habit of building off random real-world incidents to craft elaborate yarns of facing persecution as a brown Muslim American, and then pitching these as confessions that resonated with countless members of the South Asian diaspora. Meanwhile, women of color who worked on his show (including South Asian American women) allegedly suffered while helping build his platform as a comedic truth-teller. When Patriot Act was canceled in 2020, some of its former staffers publicly shared their mixed feelings on having made such a unique show—an Indian American–hosted talk show centered around confrontational interviews and taboo topics like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi—while allegedly facing mistreatment behind the scenes. That alleged mistreatment, Malone reports, included gender-based workplace discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, to the point where three women had threatened to sue Patriot Act.

There were still more revelations—that Minhaj had broadcast made-up stories about his wife to national audiences, that he had concocted a tall tale about rushing his daughter to the hospital for fear of anthrax exposure from a threatening letter, that he had centered a 2017 stand-up special around a false story regarding a white high-school classmate who had rejected him, consigning her to years of doxing and digital harassment from his fans. The news spurred complex, layered conversations about the necessity of strict factuality in emotive storytelling, the hypocrisy of famous men of color speaking to their oppression while allegedly mistreating women of color, and how American culture incentivizes representatives of marginalized communities to center the trauma of bigotry in their creative ventures. But there was also a sense of exhaustion and heartbreak, especially among those who had long admired the comedian. Whatever you’d made of his act, Minhaj had been one of the past decade’s key figures for brown representation in American media. All of a sudden, here he was, exposed.

It’s unsurprising that Minhaj and his brand of comedy flowered during Donald Trump’s presidency, as liberals who were righteously opposed to his administration’s Muslim travel ban and Islamophobic campaigning turned to late-night talk-show hosts for passionate (if often impotent) riffs against the GOP’s xenophobia. After Minhaj’s anti-Trump monologue at the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner went viral, he anchored himself as a #Resistance hero, landing his Patriot Act hosting gig in 2018 and using the show to talk through urgent issues like civil rights law, America’s cruel immigrant crackdowns, police brutality and George Floyd, and much more. All from the perspective of an Indian Muslim, hosting his own show, taking the country to task on his terms, terms that had long been absent from the white man–dominated industries of stand-up comedy and late-night TV.

That perspective, of course, also included Minhaj’s personal life: His real-life parents showed up on Patriot Act to talk about their lives as immigrants. Whether tacitly or explicitly, Minhaj all but encouraged the wider perception that he was an upfront and blunt truth-teller with a haunting past, that he understood the travails afflicting brown Americans because he knew them firsthand. In the New Yorker piece, looking to Minhaj’s Netflix stand-up specials, Malone points to anecdotes wherein the host brought up an FBI informant at his childhood mosque, a prom date who rejected him thanks to her racist parents, and the dangers that he and his family faced after Patriot Act aired segments on international despots like Mohammed bin Salman and Narendra Modi. Minhaj’s responses to the New Yorker mark the first time he’s acknowledged that all of this was not completely true—that because his “day-to-day life is not very interesting or compelling,” as he told Malone, he had to pretend as though it were in order to “highlight” the types of stories that did happen to “so many other kids.”

Beyond the eyebrow-raising implication that being on the receiving end of death threats and government surveillance is what makes someone’s life “interesting” or “compelling,” the fallacy of Minhaj’s argument here is given away by the man himself: that there are more than enough brown people across the country who’ve actually had their loved ones and livelihoods attacked in those very ways. If those same Americans were fans of Minhaj, it was because he effected a nationwide breakthrough of the truth that many of us have, in fact, been abused in our personal and professional lives thanks to our skin color or faith. In the thick of the post-9/11 anti-Muslim fervor that Patriot Act’s title refers to, there were hundreds of hate crimes visited upon American Muslims, Sikhs, and anyone who looked to be of Arab descent, while several of the nation’s most prominent figures in politics and media disparaged Islam and Middle Easterners as a whole. There was no feasible way to counter this without being sneered at as an al-Qaida recruit-in-waiting. Pakistani American communities were infiltrated by undercover law enforcement officers, and many of their residents were arbitrarily detained. White-on-brown bullying raged in schools, including mine—and yes, plenty was targeted at me specifically, as one of the few kids of color in some of Michigan’s whitest schools. Within such a hostile environment, in which peers and authorities saw you as less worthy, there were few to no willing audiences for how such plights made any of us feel.

What bothers me so much, then, when Whoopi Goldberg and Minhaj fans defend his lies as artistic license, is that they miss the point of why Minhaj could emerge as he did: because the people he claimed to be speaking for were led to believe he really did get it on a visceral, fundamental level. This was a rare public figure who could be a high-profile voice for our fears, who could get people in the highest levels of society to hear and pass on his onstage and offstage anecdotes about how Trump’s Islamophobia-fueled rise affected him and his family directly, as it did ours. Obviously, many of America’s greatest artist-activists have dabbled in artifice and used it to speak poignantly to experiences and issues that didn’t apply to them personally, like the Los Angeles–born Randy Newman singing from the point of view of impoverished Southerners. But, as opposed to stand-up greats like Richard Pryor who supplemented their commentary with clearly exaggerated alter egos, Minhaj never even hinted that he was doing a character, or giving voice to stories he’d heard from others, or gesturing toward the broader landscape of Muslim Americans. Minhaj took what real, everyday brown folks were going through and led those people to believe that he’d also been there—earning his fame and plaudits from that very trust, as well as the trust that engendered among those who wished to understand brown Americans.

What’s more, you could argue that Minhaj’s refusal to outline the differences between his persona and livelihood actually further harmed people of the very communities he claimed to be making “culturally relevant.” It’s a cruel twist of irony that brown writers, journalists, and fact-checkers—again, several of them women—may have been enticed by the idea of working on a show like Patriot Act because they thought they were uplifting the platform of someone who spoke for people like them, only to end up being allegedly dismissed and treated poorly by a hero of the community. (Prashanth Venkataramanujam, the show’s co-creator, told the New Yorker it was “painful to hear” that “some people who worked at the show did not enjoy their experience,” and that the show’s creators “tried very hard to make Patriot Act one of the most inclusive and diverse spaces in all of late-night, and it was.”)

There’s an idea, in the annals of “representation” culture, that people of a marginalized group should unconditionally cheerlead someone famous who shares their background or identity—that South Asian Americans should support Minhaj, one of the few powerful Indians in American culture, no matter what, because he’s using his pedestal to air their grievances and fashion a safer world for their opinions. But what if that pedestal was built on falsehoods? What if it was exclusively built on the stories and labor and hardships of others? What’s left is the feeling of disappointment—the hollow suspicion that, after all this time, the entire thing has been little more than an act that took advantage of something very real.