Hasan Minhaj Explains Himself

Not so long ago, Hasan Minhaj was a comedian at the zenith of his powers: an audacious storyteller and TV host whose nimble, forensic take on the culture could rearrange an audience’s perspective on the world. He transformed stand-up through performances rich with visual media. Minhaj, a true student of comedy, was a front-runner to succeed Trevor Noah as the host of The Daily Show.

Then he got canceled.

At least it felt that way. On September 15, 2023, The New Yorker published a story that sought to verify anecdotes from Minhaj’s stand-up specials. He admitted to the reporter that some of those stories weren’t exactly true. Yes, he’d taken liberties for the sake of comedic storytelling. The Internet pounced, with some branding him a liar. Nearly every major news publication and TV network weighed in. A flood of op-eds followed. One writer for the Los Angeles Times said Minhaj’s “falsehoods” had made the world less safe for Muslims.

“It was painful, there’s no doubt about it,” he says now. “It was the first time I saw the speed and velocity of the Internet, how quickly a story can take off. That part of it was very new to me and disorienting.”

Then he lost the Daily Show gig.

Minhaj confirmed to me a rumor that has swirled since last fall. “We were in talks, and I had the gig, and we were pretty much good to go,” he says. After the story came out, he got a call telling him the job was no longer his. “It went away,” he says, adding, “That’s part of showbiz.”

A month later, Minhaj launched a counteroffensive. He posted a twenty-one-minute video to YouTube seeking to refute many of the claims in the New Yorker story. Armed with recordings of his interview with the writer and his own emails with people mentioned in the article, Minhaj showed how he constructed stories based on his actual experiences—moving around timelines, inserting scenarios that didn’t happen—and explained why he made those decisions. By bringing “the receipts,” as he put it, he sought to prove that the writer did not operate in good faith and had omitted key details of their conversations. The message he was trying to convey: “Don’t fact-check comedy.”

The result was a Rorschach test: Legions came to his defense, convinced The New Yorker had done him dirty. Others thought the publication had been overly aggressive in prosecuting Minhaj but the thrust of the story remained.

After posting the video, Minhaj threw himself into work. He poured the experience into a new stand-up set, which he took on a cross-country tour. Over the summer, he launched an interview show on YouTube, Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know, hosting guests from the world of politics and sports like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and JJ Redick. He also appeared in the summer box-office hit It Ends with Us. And on October 22, the comedy set he’s been touring with comes to Netflix as the stand-up special Off with His Head.

You might call this a redemption story—a celebrity whose career was nearly ruined fights his way back. But does Minhaj need redeeming? He doesn’t think so, nor do most of his fans and many of his fellow comedians. Certainly he pushed his art to the limit in service of, as he told The New Yorker, “emotional truth.” But does that explain why he was the rare stand-up to be rigorously fact-checked?

You might also consider what happened to Minhaj a cautionary tale. In today’s capricious culture, what feels acceptable can change at the speed of social media. One day you can be a hero for the stands you’re taking, and the next you might wake up to find that the line has moved—and you’re on the wrong side of it. Regardless, Minhaj had a choice to make: How am I going to react?

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This August morning, like almost every morning, Minhaj, thirty-nine, wakes up in his Greenwich, Connecticut, house around 6:00 to the sound of his six-year-old daughter. A nanny cam picks up the ambient sound of her singing along to the Frozen soundtrack, which is piped into the room he shares with his wife, Beena. Within a few minutes, the girl and her four-year-old brother pile into their parents’ bed. Everyone is still in their pajamas—sweatpants and raggedy T-shirts—and everyone is still groggy. It is a hazy, blissful forty-five minutes. At 6:58, the morning lurches to reality. Minhaj and Beena wrestle their kids into clothes and feed them breakfast. He makes himself a double shot of espresso from his Breville machine, gets the kids into his Kia Carnival, drops them off at school, and heads to work at his production company, 186K Films, in a neighboring town.

It’s all very normal and very suburban and not what I would expect from one of the most popular comedians of his generation when I ask him to describe his typical day. He briefly mentions the period between 8:00 A.M. and when he gets home at night, referring to it as “writing, producing, editing, and all that jazz.” It reminds me of a line from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, in which he describes the life of two hard-charging newspapermen: “In a hostile world both of them needed to be loved by their families and were.”

In the past year, the world has been, if not hostile to Minhaj, then certainly harsh. His wife, parents, and sister played a significant part in helping him through it. “I really do believe, no matter how bad things get, there is this beautiful collective spirit, all we have is each other,” he says. “You can always come home, no matter what happens. I’m not kidding. I could ostensibly move in [to my parents’ house] with my wife and kids.”

Sometimes he feels he disappointed them. Although he won’t go so far as to say that the public scrutiny and losing the Daily Show opportunity threatened everything that he built—his career, his idyllic personal life—it seems clear to me that the experience did strain it.

“The most painful thing is my wife and my parents,” he says. “To see them hurt, to see them engage with ‘So I’m reading on the Internet…’—that is so painful. I’m the eldest. I feel really, really sad that I let my parents down.

“I’m very lucky that they got to see many beautiful highs of my career. Watching them experience a painful moment, an embarrassing moment in your career, I wish I didn’t put them through that. That’s the tough part.”

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When Minhaj started performing stand-up nearly twenty years ago, he would return home to his parents’ house in Sacramento late at night. His dad, an Indian immigrant who worked as a chemist for the state of California, thought his son was on drugs, or dealing drugs, or both. “I don’t think you’re pursuing a career in comedy,” his dad said to him.

“I wish I was cool enough to be dealing drugs,” Minhaj responded. “I was actually performing at a bar in front of eight people.”

His parents’ dream for their son was the law. After graduating from the University of California, Davis, with a degree in political science, Minhaj took the LSAT and applied to law school at USC and UCLA. Both schools wait-listed him, and he allowed his LSAT score to expire.

Much to his parents’ dismay, Minhaj relentlessly pursued a career in show business. He auditioned for roles on sitcoms like Community and New Girl. He got none of them, though he did book a commercial for Pizza Hut. His ascendancy happened slowly and then all at once. In 2014, Jon Stewart hired him as a correspondent on The Daily Show. He continued to perform stand-up for larger and larger audiences. In 2017, he put together his first comedy special for Netflix, Homecoming King, hiring a little-known director, Christopher Storer, who would go on to create The Bear. It was a radical reimagining of what a stand-up special could be.

Minhaj, then thirty-two, skinny and fresh-faced, told stories about his childhood as a first-generation Indian American and about his life as a Muslim. Other comedians of Indian heritage have gained fame in the U.S., of course (Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling, just to name a couple). But few have leaned on their identity to the same extent as Minhaj. South Asian and Muslim audiences embraced him as their own, while white audiences were hooked by his anecdotes about growing up in an immigrant household and the Islamophobia he faced.

His stand-up also looked different. He deployed Steadicams, which allowed him to address the viewer directly. He introduced mixed media—what Minhaj jokingly calls “PowerPoint comedy”—beaming images, social-media posts, and even emails he’d received onto a screen behind him.

His bet paid off. Homecoming King received near-unanimous praise and earned him a Peabody. That same year, he hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the first of Donald Trump’s presidency. (Trump didn’t show up.) Minhaj’s résumé continued to grow. In 2018, he got his own hosting gig, Netflix’s Patriot Act, a half-hour news-comedy show that blended Minhaj’s signature style with current events. It ran for thirty-nine episodes and earned both Emmy and Peabody awards. He was named to the Time 100 list. He appeared in season 2 of The Morning Show. He released his second Netflix special, The King’s Jester, which begins with Minhaj telling a story directly to the camera about his own infertility issues and the birth of his daughter.

In less than a decade, he had risen from a fledgling comedian to one of the most influential people on the planet. He showed an almost preternatural ability to see around corners. His friend and fellow comedian Ronny Chieng believes no one understands the zeitgeist like Minhaj. “He knows exactly what’s done in culture, he knows what’s next, and he knows how to get there,” Chieng says. “That’s why he would’ve been perfect for The Daily Show. His superpower is knowing what the culture needs right now.”

In 2017, Minhaj, along with comedians like Hannah Gadsby, Jerrod Carmichael, and Bo Burnham, was at the vanguard of an emerging style of comedy that relied on deeply personal anecdotes and the subversion of typical joke-punchline stand-up. Minhaj mined his own life for material.

In Homecoming King, for instance, he describes growing up with an Indian father. Young Hasan would run through the grocery-store aisles screaming and picking up soda bottles, drop them, and watch the bottles explode. “Then my dad would do what most brown parents do to this day,” he tells the audience. “He’d check to see if the coast is clear, and he’d slap the shit out of me.

“Americans hit their kids on the arm and bruise their body,” he explains amid a roar of laughter. “Immigrants slap you across the face and bruise your soul. It’s Guantánamo of the mind.”

His parents, who were skeptical of his pursuit of comedy, came to realize their son’s growing fame and importance. Minhaj recalls a moment when he brought them to a set. An assistant asked the three of them what they wanted to drink. After the assistant left, Minhaj’s mom turned to him and said, “A white girl gets you coffee?” When his parents were growing up in India, the British might tell a young Indian girl or boy to run and fetch them tea. “For them to see a girl named, let’s say, Mackenzie get me coffee,” he says, “it’s all very new stuff.”

It was his personal stories—and the fact that he embellished details about them for dramatic effect—that came under scrutiny in the New Yorker story. In The King’s Jester, for example, he tells one about opening an envelope that had been mailed to his house and how some of the mysterious white powder inside spilled on his daughter. The white powder, he told The New Yorker, was mailed to his house but did not actually touch his daughter.

In his YouTube rebuttal, Minhaj explains why he made that choice: In the first draft, which he wrote to convey how scary the incident really was, his comedian friends thought that his wife came across as a nag. When the envelope with the white powder arrived at their home, Beena became upset about what might have happened and expressed her fear that her husband’s career had put his family in danger. In the moment, it was a legitimate emotion, but as part of his act it seemed like an overreaction. By altering the anecdote to have the white powder land on their daughter, he was able to convey faster and more sharply how the consequences of his career choices had suddenly become very real. Plus, Minhaj, not his wife, was now the butt of the joke. I ask him whether he regrets taking that liberty.

“It was a shortcoming on my part. I could’ve made that exposition better. I didn’t need to pull in my daughter,” he says. “That’s the one thing where I’m looking back on it and I’m like, you could’ve changed that, kept it the way it was. Our daughter was like right there, [the white powder] was on the table, and we just had this full-on thing. Write the scene, keep tweaking it.

“The toughest thing about being a performer,” he adds, “is that everyone is a character in your life. I have to balance that they have to win and I have to lose. You never get it right, you know.”

It is the only time in our interviews that he expresses regret about embroidering the details of his life onstage.

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In person, Minhaj is charming and generous. He dresses well and likes to talk about menswear. After our second interview at Wayan—a French-Indonesian restaurant in Manhattan, where he knows the menu by heart—he takes me to one of his favorite clothing stores, Standard & Strange, where the staff knows him. They also stock his favorite brand, a Japanese label called Visvim. The third time we meet, he shows me a Visvim lookbook—a grail object for people in the know. I ask him if it’s okay for me to thumb through it. He looks surprised. “It’s yours,” he says. “It’s a gift.”

As a conversationalist, Minhaj isn’t exactly funny. As in, he’s not working to get laughs. But there are moments when he riffs on a subject and you can see the mind of a comedian at work. His brain seems to crackle with ideas—many of which are about the craft of comedy and the media environment. After our first of three meetings, he sends me a homework assignment, which includes the 2007 George Saunders essay “The Braindead Megaphone.” It is a prescient observation on what television does to our brains. Minhaj wants to discuss it with me.

Twice during our interviews, he tells me he’s “not interested in doing a fact check of my fact check of their fact check of my stand-up.” And during the hours we spend talking, he never once—neither on nor off the record—says a negative word about The New Yorker or the writer. In fact, he tells me he still reads the magazine. “I don’t want these things to change who I am,” he says. “I want to engage in the world in good faith.”

That’s what he says he was doing last year when he sat down with the writer, believing it would be a sprawling conversation about his process and what goes into his comedy. “Halfway through the interview … I was saying, you put this here and do that. I could see the journalist was not interested,” he tells me. “I remember thinking, Oh, this might not be great.”

In a statement published to X, formerly Twitter, The New Yorker said, “Hasan Minhaj confirms in the 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. … We stand by our story.”

In his rebuttal, Minhaj leans on the craft, but he ignores what seemed to irk people most. He wasn’t embellishing details about his latest flight to Los Angeles in the way Jerry Seinfeld might; he was making up stories about serious topics—racism, Islamophobia, criminal attempts on his life and his family’s—to bolster his stand-up. He had crossed an invisible line.

Many of his fellow comedians find this argument ridiculous.

“Comedy is counterculture,” Chieng says. “Sometimes the point is to cross the line.”

In the aftermath of the story, Minhaj spoke with other comedians who are friends and mentors. Mike Birbiglia and Ramy Youssef reached out. So did John Mulaney and Jon Stewart. He spent hours on the phone with them. “I remember Jon [Stewart] called, and he said, ‘Why the fuck are they doing this? And who does this benefit?’ ”

Minhaj called Chieng, who was in Australia at the time. Chieng laughed. “I didn’t think it was as serious as it was,” he says, “and in some ways I still don’t think it’s as serious as it was.

“The cultural gatekeepers loved him,” he adds. “I found it surprising that the cultural gatekeepers would turn on him so quickly and not give him the benefit of the doubt.”

In a roundtable discussion with The Hollywood Reporter, his friends launched a public defense. Comedy is “not a thing to fact-check,” Youssef said.

“I love Hasan, and I think the intent of that writer remains very nebulous,” Birbiglia said. “It’s very confusing to me.

“Nobody ever fact-checked Swimming to Cambodia,” he added.

Swimming to Cambodia is a 1987 film directed by Jonathan Demme that’s based on performances by the fast-talking monologist Spalding Gray, one of Minhaj’s biggest influences. In eighty-five minutes, Gray delves into mental health, the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, genocide, drug use, and sexual encounters. “These are all extremely serious subjects,” Minhaj says. After Gray died by suicide in 2004, his journals were published, and they showed how he crafted his monologues. “Spalding oftentimes changed timelines, moved things around—it was part of the craft,” Minhaj says. “I was walking in the footsteps of what Spalding did.”

Even before Gray’s journals came out, journalists at the time seemed to take at face value that his stories didn’t happen exactly as they were told. In 1993, The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Gray is fond of saying he never makes anything up, but that doesn’t exactly mean his stories are entirely true to life. Many people leave his shows wondering whether what he’s described has actually happened or debating the likelihood of so many weird things happening to one person. … Still, as he describes his technique, he sounds more like a novelist than an autobiographer. Things don’t necessarily happen when he says they happened in the monologues.”

Even as recently as 2015, The New Yorker—yes, the same one—said this of Gray: “He was a gifted inventor of the truth, of whatever seemed true to him at the moment.”

I ask Minhaj what he makes of this discrepancy: Journalists didn’t seem to have a problem with Gray’s embellishments about serious topics. “Maybe we live in a society where trust has been degraded to the point where that’s why that happened,” he says.

Minhaj’s rise as a comedian has coincided with an assault on the truth by politicians, other public figures, and media organizations on the right and left fringes. The style of comedy he helped pioneer relied on righteousness and raw honesty. Suddenly, the comedy club had become a sanctuary of truth. Then we learned that one of its high priests wasn’t following the rules.

But comedy is not religion, politics, or journalism. It is art that skewers those institutions and helps us better understand ourselves and our relationship to them. It also doesn’t need to be any of that: Sometimes a fart joke is just a fart joke, and the laughter feels good. In pursuit of it, comedians are obligated to cross the line—whether that means saying something publicly that everyone else is scared to utter or, in the case of Minhaj, altering personal details to illuminate a bigger idea. Even if that makes you feel uncomfortable.

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In the immediate aftermath of the article and resulting blowback, Minhaj’s comedian friends urged him to focus on work. Jon Stewart encouraged him to make something hilarious from the experience, telling him: “This is great for you.”

“When Jon told me that, I felt really seen,” Minhaj says.

Another comedian said, “Tragedy is in the close-up; comedy is in the wide.”

Two months after the story came out, Minhaj was back onstage, converting his pain into comedy. That material would become Off with His Head. If Minhaj can see around corners, then the special is a glimpse into where the culture is heading: a reappraisal of progressive righteousness. Minhaj is more acerbic and sarcastic, his jabs sharper. He is at times angry. His punchlines land on liberal icons—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton—as well as “dorky-ass, teacher’s-pet hall monitors,” whom he calls “insufferable.” Although he doesn’t mention New Yorker readers or writers specifically, he paints a vivid portrait of them.

But the hallmark of Minhaj’s comedy is that he frequently makes himself the butt of his jokes. He launched himself to popularity when identity politics was at its fever pitch, when scoring points on someone by saying, “You’re on the wrong side of history” didn’t elicit an eye roll; it endeared you to the left. And Minhaj has been beloved by progressives, including the very powerful. He likes to joke that to politicians he’s the “brown whisperer.” A positive word from him will inspire his fans—particularly those from South Asia—to vote for a candidate. In Off with His Head, he admits that he was one of those self-righteous progressives, lacerating himself for, among other things, an appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show where he chastised her for being unable to pronounce his name correctly.

Some viewers from the left might react to this material by arguing that Minhaj has taken his tragedy and veered right, embracing the politics of grievance. Such a shift would belie his YouTube show, whose guests include progressive standard-bearers. I suggest to him that Off with His Head will surprise audiences, because it’s such a departure. “Comedy, stand-up as a core medium, is, at its best, a medium that allows you to reflect about yourself,” he says. “I dunk on myself. I was that kind of insufferable guy who had hard-and-fast rules. The Ellen story—I really believed everything was black-and-white, if I do this it will solve all of this. That simplistic view is a little insufferable. It’s way more complicated than that.

“What I wanted to show is the variety of POVs that I have.”

One of those points of view is about what he calls “beige guilt.” Brown people, he says in his new stand-up special, are more racist than white people. “What I was doing was saying, ‘Let me bring you into our community. You think they’re the problem? Oh, we got some problems ourselves,’ ” he says. “We don’t talk about beige guilt and that idea of beige guilt and reconciling paradoxes, like simultaneously I am fighting the problems and I am part of the problem.

“I am here to evoke what we are really saying on WhatsApp,” he adds.

It’s not only what he’s saying that is a departure but also the way the special looks. If Spalding Gray was his spiritual advisor on Homecoming King and The King’s Jester, then Stan Lathan, who is still alive and directing Dave Chappelle’s stand-up specials, is the inspiration for Off with His Head. It is meant to feel like a nineties-era Def Comedy Jam, the style that Lathan pioneered as a director. The theater and the audience are part of the show.

Minhaj does more audience work than he has in the past, relying on their answers to land punchlines. He shows “the smudges”—wiping sweat from his brow, taking a drink of water—which he would’ve cut around in previous specials. “There’s beauty in that imperfection,” he says. He describes it as “not hiding the ball.” When so much of our media is manipulated—through AI, through clever editing, through fabrication and omission—Minhaj wanted to create something that felt real.

“There’s this feeling of, Oh, this is really what it was like that night and it is not a didactic literal medium,” he says. “This is a living, breathing thing.”

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One of the year’s biggest surprises for Minhaj is that a small movie he filmed last year in Hoboken, New Jersey, was the seventh-highest-grossing film of the summer. It Ends with Us is a romantic drama based on the best-selling Colleen Hoover book. It stars Justin Baldoni, who also directed the movie, and Blake Lively. Minhaj plays Marshall, the brother-in-law of Baldoni’s character, and most of his scenes are opposite Jenny Slate, whom he describes as “a modern-day Lucille Ball.”

“It’s a surreal, wild thing that I couldn’t even imagine,” Minhaj says. “I don’t think anyone would’ve predicted it. I remember when Justin reached out to me and asked me to be part of the movie; he was so impassioned.”

Equally surprising, to Minhaj at least, is that since its release the movie has attracted nearly as much attention for the alleged drama between Baldoni and Lively as it has for its huge success. It is unclear what the beef actually is—that remains the provenance of TikTok sleuths—and when I bring it up to Minhaj, he claims to be just as confused.

“I can’t speak to other people’s experience, but everybody was very professional and cool to me,” he says. “It was lovely and everybody was lovely, and it is just as disillusioning for me, because I’m like, What happened? Wait, what’s going on?”

There is humor, he says, in the fact that even what should be an unvarnished win—a box-office smash—is tinged with controversy. “It was a strange, bizarre year, and I am a comic deep down, because there are moments where I’m laughing at it.”

Then he pulls up a Dave Barry quote on his phone. “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.” This quote, he tells me, is the whole ball game. It is about embracing the “cosmic joke.”

It is also about faith.

He recounts a story that Ramy Youssef, who is also Muslim, told him this year. “Pursuing this thing called comedy is an act of faith,” according to Youssef. “You have an idea in your head, you have seen it, and you’re telling your agent, you’re telling your colleagues, you’re telling the line producer, I swear to God this is a real thing, I’m telling you it looks like this, you have the drawing, this is what the set is going to look like, and the unseen becomes seen.”

“Every part of this thing really is an act of faith,” Minhaj says. “There are literally empty pages and you write and it fills up. I can’t articulate how or why it happens, and Ramy is like, ‘You have to have faith that everything is happening the way it’s supposed to happen.’ And coming out on the other side of it, yeah, I do believe that.”

The other side means Off with His Head and Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know. It also means having a role in another movie with blockbuster potential, Tron: Ares, which is scheduled for release next summer and has Minhaj playing a tech CEO. (“We’ve come a long way from terrorist,” he jokes about the casting of brown actors.) But most of all, it means a project that requires faith. Remember: Minhaj is a comedian who rides the zeitgeist, who sees what’s coming.

So what’s next?

“I’ve already written my next stand-up show,” he says. “It involves the stage and another comedian in an interesting way. A line producer looked at it and said, ‘I don’t want to budget this, but I’m excited.’ I’ve felt this before and it’s exciting, because it feels new and weird.”

Weird. Fresh. Risky. He’s back in his comfort zone.

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Opening image: Jacket, shirt, and tie by Gucci.

Cover: Shirt by Dolce & Gabbana; sunglasses by Ray-Ban.

Story by Michael Sebastian
Photographs by Guy Aroch
Styling by Nick Sullivan
Grooming by Rheanne White/TraceyMattingly.com
Set design by Michael Sturgeon
Tailoring by Joseph Ting
Design director: Rockwell Harwood
Contributing visual director: James Morris
Executive producer, video: Dorenna Newton
Executive director, entertainment: Randi Peck