A year ago, Hasan Minhaj‘s dreams of hosting The Daily Show were dashed in the wake of a New Yorker profile that questioned the truthiness of the personal stories he had told in his previous specials. But despite the dramatic titling, this new hour from Minhaj is not some sensational gimmick wherein he joins the ranks of those protesting their supposed cancellation.
The Gist: Minhaj has won two Peabody Awards, one for his six-season Netflix series, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, and another for the first of his two specials, Homecoming King.
For his third Netflix comedy special, Minhaj takes both a personal and political approach, expressing his views on the presidential election, immigration, the Middle East and South Asia, while also reflecting on his own family history and relationships with his parents. And yes, he does address the fallout from the New Yorker piece that criticized his storytelling methods for embellishing his past. As he joked in an Instagram post promoting the special on Monday, he typed: “Tomorrow. Netflix. 63% factual. That’s the Hasan Minhaj guarantee.”
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Minhaj’s response to his quote-unquote “controversy” looks more favorably on him when compared and contrasted with that of another comedy child of Indian immigrants, Aziz Ansari.
Memorable Jokes: It’s fall in a presidential election year, which in itself makes Minhaj’s political jokes more memorable. On the right, he quips that “there are more Indians in the Republican Party than in my bachelor party.” Why? “We are way more practical than we are progressive,” he says, before outlining his four-point political theory explaining how American immigrants from where he calls “Beige-istan” cast their votes. Moreover, Minhaj believes we’re making a grave mistake becoming fans of any president, thinking the idea is as ridiculous as wearing a T-shirt that supports a bank.
Politicians are people, he reminds us, and “they will disappoint you for different reasons.” Presidential candidates are very different sorts of people, whom he describes as sociopaths.
He stops just short of both a Gollum reference and a heavily-implied Lewinsky reference, while later explicitly describing America as “The Empire” in our real-life version of Earth as the Star Wars Universe.
Our Take: You might be surprised to hear Minhaj deliver some jokes about the pandemic in 2024, but he’s not tackling the usual premises about vaccines and masks. Rather, he points to the pandemic as a missed opportunity for his fellow Millennials. “We fumbled the bag” by saving so many elders, he argues, when their domination of home-ownership has sustained a national housing crisis.
He pits the rich fans sitting up with the “99 percenters” in the cheap seats, as if the upper-decker fans really were in East Oakland compared to Silicon Valley in the front row.
Likewise, he singles out two guys in the crowd, one a teen, the other two decades his senior, not just about why young men might listen to hucksters such as Jordan Peterson, but also for the sake of what seems like a basic dick joke. And yet, Minhaj deliberately chose a simile for the older dysfunctional phallus that limps into the ongoing tragedy that is Israel and Palestine. Why would he do that? In part, so he could talk about how divided we seem to be. Instead of Republicans and Democrats, Minhaj chooses to see us existing on a different binary: “It’s insane people and insufferable people.”
And yes, he says he’s one of the insufferable ones.
Even before he addresses his “controversy” that shook up his career aspirations a year ago, Minahj pokes fun at himself for how he corrected Ellen DeGeneres years ago on her former daytime talk show on how to pronounce his name, saying it has backfired on him and then some with people seemingly butchering the pronunciation on purpose now. To the point where he now understands why Ronny Chieng goes by Ronny and no longer tries to mock his fellow comedian for doing so.
Of all of the things Minhaj chooses for his bit about fact-checking his own comedy, why single out the kind of car he drives? Is it because it’s easy to verify? Is it because the words “Kia Carnival” are funny even before you try to picture what the car might look like? Either way, it helps to humanize him once more to his fans. He drives a Kia, he’s just like us! Furthermore, it supports his current reflection on the whole matter. “It’s a dorky controversy!” he exclaims, adding to clarify for anyone who missed the New Yorker piece or the kerfuffle that followed: “I got caught embellishing for dramatic effect.” To which he pleads guilty. But nonchalantly so now, saying, “I’m a heterosexual man. I lie all the time,” dishing out fibs as casually as Steph Curry drops three-pointers.
Which makes his retirement-age chunk feel like a total air ball when his closing argument suggests “if we treated Ruth Bader Ginsburg the same way we treated Tom Brady, abortion would still be legal in all 50 states.” To wit: Ginsburg’s replacement under a Democrat wouldn’t have flipped the Supreme Court’s 6-3 Dobbs decision in 2022.
But I’m not about to cite Shakespeare or Alice in Wonderland by yelling “Off with his head!” as Minhaj’s title suggests.
He doesn’t deserve our scorn or banishment. Perhaps our empathy, though. After all, Minhaj cops in this hour to suffering from “Good Kid Syndrome,” which may suggest that all of his joke-writing and story-telling decisions have come from a deep-seated need to hide his flaws so he can maintain our approval. I firmly believe Minhaj could show us his true self and still be loved as a comedian. Or even as a talk-show host.
Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s no magic bullet in this hour to change your mind about Minhaj. As he even jokes in reference to his foibles: “breaking news: comedians aren’t wizards.” But his thoughts about class and race and how our relationships to boundaries have deep meanings both inside the family home as well as on the global map, those are illusions worth shattering.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.