Hasan Minhaj is ready to overcome the backlash

Eeighteen minutes into his new Netflix special, Cut off his head, Hasan Minhaj addresses the controversy that rocked the comedy world and ricocheted across the general public last year, raising questions about the role of truth in storytelling and the very nature of the artistic process. When Minhaj finally addresses the subject here, in his third special, live viewers across the Bay Area sit up a little straighter in their seats. Some even exchange a knowing look.

“I don’t know if you saw that,” Minhaj said with a smirk. “Last year, The New Yorker I fact-checked my stand-up. He then mimes a journalist typing on his keyboard and starts laughing. “They were just like, Ahahaha. Latest news: magicians are not wizards,” he says.

That’s not quite what happened. In September 2023, The New Yorker published an article questioning the authenticity of the personal stories told by Minhaj in his first two stand-up specials, Homecoming King (2017) and The King’s Jester (2022). Minhaj was quick to confirm that he took artistic liberties with the facts, but that the stories, which concerned the racism he faced as an American of Indian descent and Muslim faith as a result of September 11, contained “emotional truths” and were based on real-life experiences. He called the reports – defended by the magazine – misleading.

The report and Minhaj’s response appeared to test the limits of what John Oliver, a colleague Daily show alumnus, once identified as the “internal logic” of comedy: “You will do anything for a laugh, like a sociopath. » But that was July 2016, before phrases like “alternative facts” and a new golden age of disinformation dominated the entire media ecosystem.

At the time of the scandal, Minhaj was best known as a former correspondent for The daily show then later the host of his own Netflix program, Patriot Law. As an artist known for offering insightful and comical takes on current events, often in the style of investigative journalism, being labeled a fabricator seemed like a death blow. Minhaj said scandal led to termination of near-final offer to host The daily show after Trevor Noah left – apparently Comedy Central felt that viewers would no longer trust him to break even the funny news.

Since then, audiences have been waiting for Minhaj to address the controversy head-on in his comedy. The title of the special certainly seems to be a gesture toward the backlash. But in Cut off his head, Minhaj spends surprisingly little time on the article and the controversy that followed – perhaps he feels that the 20-minute video defense he released last October was sufficient. In the special, Minhaj finds a new word to describe the scandal: “idiot.” “It’s not even a good thing. I didn’t fuck a porn star. I didn’t manipulate a boy,” he said. “I got caught embellishing for dramatic effect. The same crime your aunt is guilty of at Thanksgiving.

Although the controversy is only one part of the hour-long special, its presence is felt in its overall structure and tone. In defending himself last fall, Minhaj drew a distinction between what he does on comedy news shows and his work on stage during a stand-up show. The first is a “political comedy,” which must be based on truth and rigorously verified, he said. The latter, in his words, is a “comic narration”, which puts emotion at the forefront.

On the comic spectrum, the main lines of Minhaj, Cut off his head is more in the tradition of political comedy. It has the feel of a classic stand-up set, marking a stark contrast to Homecoming King And The king’s jester. These two specials took place like off-Broadway one-man shows or an evening at the Moth. The specials featured dynamic camera movements, moving in and out of the stage, sometimes directly into Minhaj’s face so that he could address the non-theatrical audience directly, enhancing the dramatic effect of his stories.

In Cut off his head, rather than captivating his audience with tall tales, Minhaj instead opts for a more observational mode, a tight set of jokes strung together to offer his perspective on topics like politics, race, and Zillow, along with a collection of anecdotes scattered personal details. It is as if Minhaj anticipated his audience’s expectation of an epic tale of The New Yorker saga, only to briefly mention it and continue to show his craft in a different comedic style. The new special plays like an implicit response to anyone who doubted his stand-up abilities in the wake of the scandal: He may have embellished, but it wasn’t as a crutch. Cut off his head is just as good, if not sometimes better, than any of his previous work. Critics of Minhaj’s bona fides need to step aside.

Underpinning much of Minhaj’s special is the point of view of a millennial American, a perspective that is mostly absent from the hosting pulpits of American late-night comedies, notable exception of the rotating cast of animators on The daily show, who must be more impersonal in the context of their shared tasks. Here Minhaj, on the other hand, can put the personal first. With aggression, he expresses the deepest frustrations of his generation. Take the coronavirus for example. While some saw it as a catastrophe, Minhaj saw it as a missed opportunity. For years, millennials have complained about the housing shortage in the United States. “And then, in March of 2020, God said, here,” Minhaj said in the voice of God, “here is a disease that is specifically killing older people.”

But this is perhaps the greatest contrast between Cut off his head and the first two specials are Minhaj’s own on-stage layout. In the earlier work, one could feel every beat of the performance, the delivery of every impeccable joke, but visibly the byproduct of repetition. In the new special, Minhaj feels relaxed, confident in a way that conveys more experience. With controversy and dozens of stories from his past behind him, the special centers its own thoughts on where we are now and where we’re going — and boy, can we use all the help we can get.