Comedian and host Hasan Minhaj admitted to embellishing stories he shared in his standup specials and on his Netflix series, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj.
In a profile from The New Yorker, reporter Clare Malone found that she was unable to verify certain anecdotes that Minhaj shared in The King’s Jester, many of which had to do with coming of age in America post-9/11. One such anecdote that she was unable to confirm was that Minhaj was once sent a mysterious white powder that his child almost came in contact with, and that an FBI agent attempted to infiltrate his mosque when he was in high school.
When Malone confronted Minhaj, he explained that those anecdotes were not true, but said they were rooted in an “emotional truth” that pointed to a larger idea he was trying to convey in his special. “The punch line is worth the fictionalized premise,” he told The New Yorker.
“Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth,” he said. “My comedy Arnold Palmer is seventy percent emotional truth—this happened—and then thirty percent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.”
In another instance in The King’s Jester, he claimed he set up a meeting at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., to discuss doing an interview with Mohammed bin Salman. He shared in the special that he hid the meeting from his wife, who was against the idea.
He recalled that once he returned to New York, “Everybody at the office is texting me—‘Are you O.K.?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you watching the news?'” Minhaj claimed that the news had just broken that journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
But The New Yorker found that Minhaj’s meeting actually occurred about a month before Khashoggi’s October 2018 murder, according to an email. The comedian admitted that he flubbed the timelines to “make it feel the way it felt.”
He then added that his “day-to-day life is not very interesting or compelling,” but noted, “my comedy storytelling certainly has to be.”
In a statement to Variety, Minhaj maintained that there was some truth to his stories: “All my standup stories are based on events that happened to me. Yes, I was rejected from going to prom because of my race. Yes, a letter with powder was sent to my apartment that almost harmed my daughter. Yes, I had an interaction with law enforcement during the war on terror. Yes, I had varicocele repair surgery so we could get pregnant. Yes, I roasted Jared Kushner to his face,” he said.
He continued, “I use the tools of standup comedy—hyperbole, changing names and locations, and compressing timelines to tell entertaining stories. That’s inherent to the art form. You wouldn’t go to a Haunted House and say ‘Why are these people lying to me?’—The point is the ride. Standup is the same.”
The New Yorker report also detailed Minhaj’s reported frustration with factchecking for Patriot Act, a claim which the comedian denied in a statement, saying, “A team of news producers fact-checked every line of every draft of every script at least 8-10 times before I ever said anything on camera.”
Minhaj was recently named as a leading candidate to replace Trevor Noah as host of The Daily Show, according to three sources close to the matter.