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(Hasan Minaj) My Response to The New Yorker article.
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View Reddit by doobie_guy – View Source
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(Hasan Minaj) My Response to The New Yorker article.
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View Reddit by doobie_guy – View Source
The comments, to the reporter/writers official statement, are telling. https://x.com/claremalone/status/1717581036492644654?s=61&t=0ACoIuEiW0wI0BCDL-gX-Q
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Fascinating. Didn’t know comedians were expected to tell only true stories. I would bet most comedians tell embellished or fake stories, I thought that was common in comedy… I mean it’s just meant to be funny and a good time, right?
This is a very bad look for the New Yorker. They look manipulative AF with those quotes.
Should we also investigate if Russel Peter’s dad actually said … Russel, Somebody Gonna Get Hurt Real Bad?
I know nothing about this situation, but listening to this guy for 2 minutes made me not like him. He seems phony.
Very interesting. A craft based on storytelling should be expected to include creative works. But I don”t care enough about this issue to hear his whole argument but first impression is that Hasan is cool and his critics can be outraged at someone else.
I’m glad he recorded his meeting with the New Yorker. I think anyone doing an interview should do this.
It protexts you from people who are looking to tell their story yet are pretending to be people looking to find the truth.
Record your shit, make sure you follow the law when recording conversations though!
If you can’t record then write a summary after the fact and document when you wrote the summary. Better email that shit out.
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It’s sad, but unsurprising, that someone has to explain the complexity of persona, personality, performance, character, self, and link all that to why you can’t stand in-front of strangers expecting laughs and stay truthful.
It’s all meta.
Nothing is real.
Think about it…
Why did the mods remove the original submission from last night?
Sounds like a Racist at the New Yorker wrote a hit piece.
Imagine if we gave this level of scrutiny to the prime-time pundit shows on cable news channels and just let comedians tell stories.
Unfortunately, Hasan still does not at all demonstrate in this video that the story that truly bothered me personally – his family’s supposed anthrax scare – is even indirectly inspired by anything that actually happened. Watching his special, I fully bought into that whole disturbing episode. Why wouldn’t I?
Hasan has specifically worked for years to cultivate a persona of trustworthiness, and it always seemed well earned to me. Besides, who would ever make up such an awful and harrowing experience involving their young child just for the sake of a stand-up set? It never even occurred to me that the crisis he described might be anything other than a literal fact.
And yes, I’ve seen plenty of stand-up shows. I fully understand that stories are embellished or even wholly invented, but the degree to which that matters absolutely depends on the performer. For someone like Hasan, who’s made his name as a performer willing to tell truth to power, sincerity and credibility are crucial. He obviously understands that, or else he wouldn’t have released such a detailed response.
Reading the original article, it did feel like the prom story was considerably more complex and nuanced than the author suggested. Did Hasan handle that whole issue perfectly? Maybe, maybe not, but he’s human. He’s more than allowed to present those events the way they felt to him. And while it might not be ideal for him to crib from other people’s experiences for the FBI informant story, it does succeed in getting at his core point about what it meant to be Muslim in America after 9/11. I feel like he justified that story well enough even in the article.
But, as far as I’m concerned, Hasan has failed to make a case that the white powder incident is anything other than fiction. This video was his opportunity to prove that the story amounted more than an attempt to gain sympathy and esteem for his purported bravery as a truth-teller. He didn’t do that.
Now, I’m someone who’s followed his career from his very first appearance on *The Daily Show* through every episode of *Patriot Act* and both of his specials. I’m someone who’s been subscribed to his YouTube channel for as long as he’s had it and was so excited when he had a gig just a few blocks from my house. So it’s incredibly disheartening to see him unable to show that this most chilling story he’s ever told in his work has any meaningful basis in reality.
Hasan makes a pretty compelling case that *The New Yorker* did him dirty. But they didn’t make him stand on stage and tell thousands of people that he had to rush his daughter to the emergency room out of fear that she’d been a victim of bioterrorism. He chose to involve his family in those so-called “emotional truths.”
All of that being said, I do still like Hasan. He’s smart and talented and charismatic. But on the basis of that story alone, I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to take him or his work quite as seriously again. And that’s a real shame.
The article in the New Yorker is a disgrace. Having said that, I am uncomfortable with Hasan embellishing his stories in his standup about his experience of racism to make a wider point about society. Still, it is far less egregious than the New Yorker makes out. To summarise the video:
1. The doorstep incident. His white prom date’s mother prevented him taking her daughter to prom because of how the photos would look. This happened a few days before prom, not the day of. Hasan has email correspondence to show this is a true story except for the timing – fair enough.
2. FBI informant ‘Brother Eric’ infiltrated Hasan’s mosque, which led to police slamming Hasan against the hood of a car. Hasan admits this isn’t true but does claim undercover ‘agents’ (presumably he means informants) physically harassed him at a basketball game. Understandably there isn’t any evidence to back this up but Hasan’s story is not implausible given what we know about the FBI’s surveillance.
3. The anthrax incident. Hasan opened his mail and white powder fell out onto the kitchen table (not anthrax), but his daughter was several feet away and did not need to be taken to the hospital. This has little to do with racism so I’m more on board with Hasan’s comedic licence here.
All comedians make up exaggerated stories for their standup. But I’m struggling to articulate why I find Hasan’s more distasteful than, say, Dave Chappelle’s, which also has an underlying social commentary.
This is like bashing Heath Ledger for what The Joker did in Dark Knight. Hasan Minaj is an entertainer, his job is to entertain.
Interesting. I always presumed that the stories told by comedians on stage, were made up anyways. I never, for a single moment, thought “Wow, this really happened to them?”. My thought process was always more like: “Funny/not funny, didn’t happen/didn’t happen like that, doesn’t matter because the message is understood”. Done. Of course I totally believe that something did happen to them or others around them, which inspired them to do the bit. But not 1:1.
I had no idea that other people were expecting those comedic stories to be factually true to 100%.
All standup comedy is fiction designed to elicit laughter. I thought we all knew that?
Aw man, does this mean Bert Kreischer isn’t really “the Machine”?
Apparently Hasan went to the Ricky Bobby school of Hand Gestures.
I don’t really understand the outrage to begin with. Comedians make up stories. Richard Pryor and Dave Chapelle told literally word for word the same story about the TV Exec who told them “you can’t say f-ggot because you’re not gay” so it either didn’t happen to one of them or it happened to neither of them.
They’re story tellers. They tell stories.
dis dude is exhausting.
Comparing “The Machine” to Hasan’s stories is an interesting exercise I hadnt really thought of before this drama. “The Machine” is a mostly harmless funny story. Hasan’s stories paint a picture of discrimination, and the examples he addressed were more serious sequences between his jokes.
*Prom*: Hasan seems almost completely vindicated and the New Yorker article stretched waaaaay too far to twist the story to fit their narrative.
*FBI Encounter*: I mostly side with Hasan on this one. “X happened to my friend” vs “X happened to me” makes a story work for a comedian. He’s building a rapport with the audience and nobody knows or cares about his friend. The fact that his friend was comfortable with him sharing the story, and that Hasan dealt with lower levels of FBI infiltration makes this whole thing reasonable for a comedy show.
*Anthrax*: Hasan can pretty much fuck off on this one. I understand his explanation and the general fear he was experiencing at the time. Taking the story this far off course and presenting it as true without a comedic punchline is over my line of acceptability.
At the end of the day, comedian’s job is to “find the line” and ride it. In most cases, it’s a question of “how far can I push the audience to laugh at something they’d never be able to say out loud?”. Hasan’s stretching of the truth was on the off-beats though.
Neal Brennan’s “3 Mics” is a great way to frame this.
* Mic 1 – One-Liners: Lie all you want.
* Mic 2 – Comedic stand-up stories: Stretch the truth to the edge of believability. Or just make it up. Nobody REALLY cares if that happened but it often helps if it *could have* happened.
* Mic 3 – Serious/Personal: More truth is expected. You can stretch some, but the core must be honest.
Hasan’s example stories all lived on Mic 3. Prom was a personal truth where the timeline was adjusted – no problem. FBI Encounter was more of “cultural/societal truth” where the events did happen (to someone else) and story sharing was consented – no problem. Anthrax was kind of a justified personal paranoia that morphed into a mostly fabricated story – doesn’t sit well with me.
*edit* I just wanted to clarify that even though the Anthrax story crossed the line of acceptable to me – he’s an artist and I don’t think serious blowback is really justified. Does it call his credibility into question for something like hosting the Daily Show? Yes. Should he be able to continue to have a successful career in this space? Yes. Did the New Yorker skew their article and do more damage to their own credibility than they did to Hasan? I think so.
This is way more of an apology than anyone deserves for such a childish issue at best, or a hit piece for attention at worst.
Hassan is too classy to say it, but when he’s suggesting that the New Yorker should have looked at other standup specials from other comedians to understand the baseline of what is normal for a special, he’s talking about people like Trevor Noah who is obviously qualified for The Daily Show.
I mean I love Noah but he *obviously* embellishes just as much as Hasan does to create a narrative – the story about him, a snake charmer, and two French tourists in Bali jumps to mind. It was amazing.
Anyone watching Noah knows that the dialogue of that incident is not accurate and is exaggerated for comedic effect and also to establish a perspective of colonial and post colonial attitudes and privilege, and anyone watching Hasan knows that FBI agents don’t drop charges if you make a funny joke that lands. Hassan even talks in his special about the comedic process of what reasonable people would understand to be a joke.
Now, I’m 100% Team Hasan on this, but I don’t agree that the New Yorker journalist had it out for him. Journalists genuinely take things literally that way, and the way they think is very different from the way storytellers and memoir writers think.
Hasan is also being singled out because frankly, that standup special was amazing and his energy was electric. I watched it more than once and I asked friends to watch it too. I didn’t expect the FBI story to have happened exactly as he said it but I did take the segue in which he talked about someone who really was imprisoned in the way to be true, and it turns out that it was. That was my takeaway and it was clearly his intention that it would be our takeaway.
Much of his special and his work in general has the “There goes I but for the grace of God” type themes – difficult experiences he had but turn d out okay in the end, despite others not being so lucky. The story about his prom date, too, was not about him being a victim – it was about parents growing and evolving including his own.
All that said, I think it’s important to have these conversations, especially as we live in an environment where some people trust comedians more than the press.
I love Hasan and am still a fan and I’m also going to say I read The New Yorker article and think it was important to publish, too, and don’t have any issues with the journalist’s approach. I have a lot of friends who are great journalists, and yes, the good ones are nitpicky and anal and take things literally and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It just comes with the territory of being a precise reporter.
The user MarcTurnTables sums it well.
“Interesting vid.
He lead with the strongest case he had. The prom thing. And he was mostly right.
The other stuff he admits to be a complete confabulator about.
Brother Eric story is a lie. He said it.
Anthrax, didn’t happen.
Guy should just find a corner and sit for a month or two.”
In the New Yorker they said there was no police report about the anthrax. Seems unusual that it wouldn’t be.
The email to his ex when shw got married is plain weird.
This guy is a dickhead
After watching the video and reading the article, the article is really misleading and feels like it’s trying to hurt Hasan’s reputation. I get what hasan is saying about the political comedy and storytelling comedy but hasan should not compare his type of storytelling to other Comedian’s storytelling.
Im not an expert but that feels wrong. Kevin Hart’s story about his dad walking to a spelling B with an erection and yelling “You gon’ learn today” is not the same as using stories to prove discrimination.
That said, the first story is a good example of him slightly twisting the facts to get a good story out of it. The second story I feel he could’ve been honest about the fact that it wasn’t him, he didn’t really need to use someone else’s story but it’s a choice I guess. Still doesn’t sit super well.
The last story however is where it stretches too much. Again I understand that it’s a choice, but he could’ve told the story in a way that relays the scare without fabricating the hospital thing.
I don’t like Hasan’s comedy for this very reason, the stories are just not believable for me (even as a Muslim living in America). There are other stories that don’t bear as much cultural significance as this one that aren’t believable but don’t get backlash. One of those stories is about how his parents did not want him to marry a Hindu woman and he persists until he gets to the doorstep of his wife’s family and his father laments “what will people say” and that makes hasan leave the doorstep. Only to have his mind changed at the last second by his sister who yells at their dad.
That doesn’t sit well because it feels like a script, doesn’t feel organic. Again it’s a choice, but this choice has more of a negative impact in stories to do with discrimination.
At the end of the day, hasan should try to learn from this and not deflect entirely despite The New Yorker being completely in the wrong here. Hasan’s comedy needs to be more authentic as it deals with very potent subjects.
Man, fuck The New Yorker and the reporter who wrote that article.
It was plastered _all over the internet._
I saw dozens of posts here on Reddit, and everyone was shitting on Hasan Minaj.
Lots of people were influenced by that article, and it’s too late to undo the damage.
The article is shockingly misleading, and purposefully so. That reporter would be canned immediately by any outlet with a smidgen of journalistic integrity.
‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’ he’s a comedian, he has artistic license to say whatever he wants to induce emotion, period. just like a novelist. in what world do some of yall live where u think andrew dice clay spoke in nursery rhymes at the bank?
My takeaways:
1 Hasan is great.
2 go kings!
This guy’s appearance on Jeopardy was obnoxious / off-putting / narcissistic. Hadn’t heard of these allegations, but have zero interest in seeing anything more of him
He is performing. Don’t believe him for a second.
After watching this, I’m 80% on Hassan’s side. It’s so aggravating that the New Yorker left out pivotal details that provided the logic of exaggerating these stories. The Anthrax one definitely went a bit off the rails, but it seems like there were too many cooks in the kitchen, with everyone having input on how to tell that story.
Does anyone else feel like someone with a lot of influence was angry at him and wanted to ruin his career? It seems so weird to have this random nothing burger of a hit piece on a comedian who has typically shined a light on what society ignores.
Wow, where is the fact checking for white comedians? They have very serious allegations directed at authorities and businesses. No one fucking cares because comedy is entertainment and it’s part of the suspension of disbelief.
Entertainment through parody is literally what stand-up is about. Of course there is some truth, and some lies. The fact that there is any fragment of truth to his stories speaks to an integrity that is not expected whatsoever.