Unfunny “comedian” gets awards, Netflix specials by talking about how racist America is

The New Yorker investigates: It turns out all his stories are false.

You can’t go poor in this country accusing white Americans of racism.

FULL STORY

The Awards:

The comedian Hasan Minhaj[’s] Netflix series, “Patriot Act” … won an Emmy and a Peabody Award … has led to two Netflix comedy specials… He recently conducted a lengthy sit-down interview with Barack Obama and is a leading candidate to succeed Trevor Noah as the next host of “The Daily Show.” …

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Minhaj'’s Story #1 in his hilarious act — He got turned down by an American girl for the Homecoming Dance and 20 years later, he’s still slandering her and her family as racist bigots:

The central story of his first Netflix special, “Homecoming King,” which was released in 2017, is about his crush on a friend, a white girl with whom he shared a stolen kiss and who accepted his invitation to prom but later reneged in a humiliating fashion; Minhaj showed up on her doorstep the night of the dance, only to see another boy putting a corsage on her wrist. Onstage, Minhaj says that his friend’s parents didn’t want their daughter to take pictures with a brown boy, because they were concerned about what their relatives might think. “I’d eaten off their plates,” Minhaj says. “I’d kissed their daughter. I didn’t know that people could be bigoted even as they were smiling at you.”

The Truth: 

But the woman … told me that she’d turned down Minhaj, who was then a close friend, in person, days before the dance. Minhaj acknowledged that this was correct ….

Why it was “emotionally true,” according to Minhaj:

As a “brown kid in Davis, California,” he said, he’d been conditioned to put his head down and “just take it, and I did.” 

OH MY GOSH — A GIRL REJECTED HIM. THAT’S NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE! He was totally justified in trying to destroy her life!

The woman also said that she and her family had faced online threats and doxing for years because Minhaj had insufficiently disguised her identity, … during the show’s Off Broadway run, Minhaj had used a real picture of the woman and her partner, with their faces blurred, projected behind him as he told the story.

[W]hen she confronted Minhaj about the online threats brought on by the Netflix special—“I spent years trying to get threads taken down,” she told me—Minhaj shrugged off her concerns.

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Minhaj'’s Story #2: 

{H]e relays a story about an F.B.I. informant who infiltrated his family’s Sacramento-area mosque, in 2002, when Minhaj was a junior in high school. As Minhaj tells it, Brother Eric, a muscle-bound white man who said he was a convert to Islam, gained the trust of the mosque community. …But Minhaj had Brother Eric pegged from the beginning. Eventually, Brother Eric tried to entice the boys into talking about jihad. Minhaj decided to mess with Brother Eric, telling him that he wanted to get his pilot’s license. Soon, the police were on the scene, slamming Minhaj against the hood of a car. Years later, while watching the news with his father, Minhaj saw a story about Craig Monteilh, who assumed the cover of a personal trainer when he became an F.B.I. informant in Muslim communities in Southern California. “Well, well, well, Papa, look who it is,” Minhaj recalls telling his father. “It’s our good friend Brother Eric.” …

[M]inhaj’s teen-age hunch, it seems, was proved right. The moment is played for laughs, but the story underscores the threat that being Muslim in the United States carried during the early days of the war on terror. …

The Truth:

Does it matter that [this never] really happened to Minhaj?

Prior to my meeting with Minhaj, Monteilh, a.k.a. “Brother Eric,” had told me that Minhaj’s story is a fabrication. “I have no idea why he would do that,” Monteilh said. Monteilh was in prison in 2002, and didn’t begin to work for the F.B.I. on counterterrorism measures until 2006. Details of his undercover actions were catalogued in a legal case that has made its way to the Supreme Court. Monteilh said that he’d worked only in Southern California, not the Sacramento area

The “emotional truth” of the story, according to Minhaj:

The Brother Eric story, Minhaj said, was based on a hard foul he received during a game of pickup basketball in his youth. Minhaj and other teen-age Muslims played pickup games with middle-aged men whom the boys suspected were officers. One made a show of pushing Minhaj to the ground. 

That’s it. Roughhousing at a baseball game and Minhaj fantasizes KKK cops wailing on him.

“The punch line is worth the fictionalized premise,” he said.

And what a hilarious punchline it was! Americans are racists! Hahahahahaha!

Minhaj described his work as “the dynamic range that theatre and storytelling and comedy allow you to explore.” 

Yes, but there has to be comedy.

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Minhaj'’s Story #3

…Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. …

“I remember in that moment going, oh shit, sometimes the envelope pushes back,” he told the Daily Beast, in 2022. 

The Truth: