For years, whenever I’d hear a joke by the comedian Hasan Minhaj, I felt a pang of familiarity. The stories he told were ones I knew: about being called a terrorist, or being stopped by security at the airport, or navigating white America as a Muslim and South Asian person. And while these were interactions I knew well, it was also hard for me not to cringe when I saw his standup. All I could think was: Really? This again?
Last month, The New Yorker broke the news that many of the onstage tales in Mr. Minhaj’s Netflix specials were either fabricated or greatly exaggerated. This news sparked a predictable mini-scandal, especially given that Mr. Minhaj had reportedly been in the running to be the next host of “The Daily Show.” A debate followed about the boundary between truth and fiction for comedians. For his part, Mr. Minhaj told The New Yorker, “Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth.”
As a Muslim American entertainer, Mr. Minhaj has built his career on, yes, being funny, but also on telling exactly the type of tales that are often told about people of color in America. You start with a racist encounter — one that confirms that this country is, in fact, an awful place for immigrants — then build to a humorous conclusion in which the people of color not only persist but thrive. Whether it’s in TV, films or books, these stories often find an eager audience. I know because I’ve heard a lot of these stories. I’ve benefited from telling them, too.
I was born in Pakistan, and after my parents immigrated to the United States, I grew up in a predominantly white community in suburban Indiana. In a lot of ways, my childhood was similar to Mr. Minhaj’s. My parents are both educated professionals, as were many of the other South Asians in our town. I started my career as a writer and journalist in the early 2010s, and my first major essay was about being stopped at the airport because I have a similar name to a terrorist.
As my career progressed, I continued to write about these kinds of fraught experiences, in part because I felt it was important to tell these stories but also because editors and audiences really seemed to like them. After the airport security essay, I wrote an article about kids calling me a terrorist right as I hit puberty, and I continue to write about problems Muslims face in America. The perfect story, I found, was one in which an audience could feel educated about the Muslim experience but also laugh along with me at the absurdity of life in this country post-9/11.
I’ve also watched as entertainers like Kumail Nanjiani, who co-wrote and starred in “The Big Sick,” a comedy based in part on his clashes with his traditional Pakistani parents, and Riz Ahmed, a British Pakistani actor, saw their careers elevated by positioning themselves as underdogs. In a song Mr. Ahmed released well after he’d achieved international stardom, he rapped, “They say the airport search is random / But if it’s always me it ain’t random.” Cringe as I may at those lyrics, I can’t knock the hustle. I’ve felt the draw of that path, too, and the career boost that often comes with it.
In one of his representative tales, Mr. Minhaj describes asking a white woman to prom, only to find out that her parents don’t want her being seen and photographed with a brown Muslim man. The ordeal leaves him crushed, resulting in a formative realization that he’s not like his classmates after all. The contours of the story are so familiar that the fact that Mr. Minhaj felt compelled to embellish it (the story is disputed by his would-be date, and Mr. Minhaj acknowledged that he fabricated certain details) simply speaks to how popular and alluring these kinds of stories have become.
The news about Mr. Minhaj broke a few days after I had spotted him, coincidentally, at a screening for the forthcoming satirical film “American Fiction,” based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett. The film tells the story of a hapless Black novelist and professor whose work has been rejected by a liberal, white publishing world that deems his book not Black enough, so he decides to play a prank. He writes an over-the-top story under a pen name titled “My Pafology” that’s filled with Black stereotypes — only to find that those same publishers greet it with lavish offers and glowing praise.
The film’s director, Cord Jefferson, was previously a journalist, and he’s written of making his name on the “racism beat.” He became exhausted, he said, by covering “the stories, struggles and politics of Blacks in America,” as each new outrageous piece of news would start what he called the “carousel ride: an inciting incident, 1,000 angry thinkpieces, 1,000 tweeted links, and back to where we started, until next time.”
As the debate around Mr. Minhaj reached a fever pitch, I couldn’t help but recall the image of him sitting in that movie theater, watching a satire about a writer who becomes entangled in his stereotypical fabrications, all while his audience eats it up. His kind of storytelling — while very different in subject from stories of violence against Black Americans — reliably instigates a cycle similar to Mr. Jefferson’s carousel ride of outrage, catharsis and stasis.
I’m honestly tired of hearing these stories; I’m tired of telling them, too. It’s a difficult balance to strike as a minority writer in America: You want to relay your experiences in a way that will illuminate your situation, but you don’t want to get trapped rehashing the same familiar dynamic again and again. I did get stopped at the airport by Homeland Security when I was 11, but other, frankly more interesting, things have happened to me since — and a lot of those things have nothing to do with the fact that I’m brown or Muslim. I’d like to have room to tell those stories as well.
In defending his proclivity toward untruths, Mr. Minhaj said he had to conflate reality because his “day-to-day life is not very interesting or compelling.” That’s true for many people, regardless of their background. Yet many talented writers — South Asians, Muslims and writers of every other background — successfully find intrigue in the quotidian, not just in moments of oppression or struggle.
I’ve seen such moments crop up in the works of writers I admire, like Sarah Thankam Mathews and Jamil Jan Kochai, whose identities are a feature in their stories instead of the story itself. I’m looking forward to reading, hearing and watching many more of those kinds of stories: ones with nuanced interpersonal relationships and complicated interiority, told by entertainers and writers of color who aren’t writing in response to a popular prompt that mass audiences have dictated to us.
Meher Ahmad is an editor in Opinion.
Source Photographs by Jamie McCarthy and Archive Holdings Inc./Getty Images
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