But the media just keeps pushing this zero. He tells the right lies in service of the left's narratives.
Comedian Hasan Minhaj admits to making up stories of racial discrimination for Netflix special - including daughter's exposure to a 'white powder'
The much-loved comedian rose to fame with his first show titled Homecoming King in 2017
Minhaj says his stories are based on 'emotional truths' and not actual events
By Ishita Srivastava For Dailymail.Com
Hasan Minhaj's Netflix comedy specials and political show have come under fire for being littered with false stories of racial discrimination and a terrifying incident involving his daughter.
The much-loved comedian rose to fame with his first show titled Homecoming King in 2017, went on to host Netflix's political 'talk' show called Patriot Act. He ended his run with the streaming service with The King's Jester in 2022.
While on stage, Minhaj shared stories about how he was left standing at a white girl's door when he went to pick her up for their homecoming dance, had Brother Eric 'infiltrate' his local mosque, saw white powder fall on his daughter while opening a letter, was threatened at a Saudi Arabian Embassy and watched Jared Kushner sit in a chair reserved for an imprisoned Saudi activist.
All of those stories are false.
In an interview released by The New Yorker, which has the entire South Asian community divided on social media, Minhaj says his stories are based on 'emotional truths.'
'Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth,' he told the outlet. 'My comedy Arnold Palmer is 70 percent emotional truth and then 30 percent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.'
70% is based on "emotional truth," which means "lies," and the other 30% is based on hyperbole and "fiction" about those lies. Taking the starting lies to the next level.
Hasan Minhaj rose to fame with his first show titled Homecoming King in 2017, went on to host Netflix's political 'talk' show called Patriot Act. He ended his run with the streaming service with The King's Jester in 2022
Minhaj justifies the fabrication of his stories by claiming that 'the emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.'
The magazine reached out to people involved in Minhaj's stories and discovered many were either factually wrong or presented in the wrong timeline. Some of the people also ended up reaching out to Minhaj to take accountability for his fake stories, which he completely disregarded.
The unidentified woman in Minhaj's sob story of being left at the door said that the incident never even happened. She clarified she had turned her close friend down days before the dance.
The woman also said she and her family had been facing online threats and doxing for years because Minhaj had failed to adequately disguise her identity and revealed she was engaged to an Indian American man at the time.
A source also revealed to the magazine that Minhaj ran a picture of her and her husband at an Off-Broadway show with just their faces blurred out. When she reached out to Minhaj about the damage caused, he shrugged off her concerns.
...
Cory Monteilh, also known as Brother Eric in Minhaj's stories, came out to say that his entire story was completely false. Monteilh said he was in prison in 2002 and didn't begin to work for the FBI on counterterrorism measures until 2006.
All the endless boosting and promotion and privilege he received was based on lies.
And Netflix is still throwing money at him, and progressives are still pretending he's funny, and not just a whiner, race-hustler, and vicious fabulist.
The Lies of Trauma Merchants
Hasan Minhaj won over progressives by playing the victim.
By Kat Rosenfield
Today, the collective horror at [author of the Opray-boosted Million Pieces of Me "memoir" exposed as a complete fraud James] Frey's deception feels like the product of a more innocent time, particularly when compared with the muted response to last week's unmasking of his contemporary equivalent. Comedian and television personality Hasan Minhaj, an alumnus of The Daily Show, built his career on stories of the persecution he had faced as an Indian and Muslim son of immigrants in a post-9/11 America. But as outlined in a devastating report by New Yorker writer Clare Malone, his most popular material contained key omissions and barefaced lies.
The FBI informant who infiltrated Minhaj's Muslim community and then reported his mosque to the authorities? Minhaj never met him. The hospitalization of Minhaj's daughter after someone mailed him an envelope full of a white mystery powder that could have been anthrax? Never happened. And the high school ex-girlfriend who accepted Minhaj's invitation to prom, only to jilt him on her doorstep for racist reasons while her new (white) date slipped a corsage on her wrist? She had actually turned down Minhaj several days earlier, and this doorstep moment--upon which Minhaj more or less built his career--was a complete fabrication.
Much like Frey, Minhaj's popularity centered on his suffering. His work was understood to express the crude, unvarnished, and sometimes darkly funny truth of what it is like to be a brown-skinned man in a racist America: white liberal audiences treated him as a sort of mascot for the oppressed, while the culturati lauded him for speaking truth to power. Here, as Slate writer Nitish Pahwa puts it, was "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."
...
Misch presents [the question of whether a comedian's stories are authentic] as a rhetorical question, and it is--but only because of the kind of comedian Minhaj is, which is to say, the kind who is not particularly funny. Consider the top YouTube result from his Netflix special, Homecoming King, in which he talks about the harassment his family endured after 9/11. There are ripples of laughter here and there, but it's only when he stops joking and starts preaching--"I have the audacity of equality!" he says--that the audience explodes like they're at a tent revival.
Of course, this is as intended. Minhaj isn't a make-you-laugh-till-your-face-hurts comedian; he's a Daily Show guy, a pundit with a slightly-better-than-average sense of humor, but one that is smug rather than silly. His audience isn't there to laugh so much as enjoy the sensation of moral authority with a wink and a titter. And while Minhaj's material works well enough on television, onstage it translates to something that is less stand-up comedy and more performance memoir.
Here, Minhaj is following in the footsteps of performers such as Hari Kondabolu, John Oliver, Seth Myers, and of course, Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special Nanette was more trauma porn that explicitly scolded its audience for showing up expecting to laugh. Critics at the time suggested that Gadsby had broken some final frontier, effectively severing the connection between comedy and jokes. Maybe laughter had had its moment; maybe what we needed from comedians now was some moral instruction in what isn't funny. Maybe what we needed was to feel bad--and to feel good about how bad we felt.
Under this new contract, drawn up amid the creeping identitarianism of Trump-era art, it is not hard to see why someone like Minhaj might fall into the trap of not just monetizing his trauma, but fabricating it.