I was scrolling through TikTok last week when I stumbled upon an interesting video: Hasan Minhaj’s response to a New Yorker article about him that had been published a little over a month prior. Minhaj is a stand-up comedian best known for his Netflix comedy-news show “Patriot Act” and his work as a “Daily Show” correspondent — which has put him in the running to be the show’s next full-time host, succeeding Trevor Noah. In the New Yorker article, entitled “Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths,’” staff writer Clare Malone calls into question the comedian’s use of fabrication in his comedic anecdotes, particularly three stories pulled out of his specials “Homecoming King” and “The King’s Jester.”
“In his standup specials, the former ‘Patriot Act’ host often recounts harrowing experiences he’s faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?” Malone’s subheadline reads. Saying that “much” of the experiences never happened to him is just one of the ways that the article subtly uses language to imply that Minhaj recklessly and ruthlessly makes up the majority of his anecdotes — something that Minhaj unsurprisingly took issue with.
For example, Malone delves into a story Minhaj told about getting rejected right before prom, at the girl’s doorstep, corsage in hand, being told by the girl’s parents that they were concerned about what their relatives might think if their daughter took pictures with a brown boy. Malone’s interview with that woman revealed that she had turned him down in person days before the dance. “Minhaj acknowledged that this was correct, but he said that the two of them had long carried different understandings of her rejection,” Malone writes.
“This whole paragraph makes it sound like I got friendzoned by Bethany [the pseudonym he uses for her], and then I turned into an angry incel and then faked racism to get back at her,” Minhaj says in the video. As Minhaj clarifies, yes, he did get rejected days before the dance and changed it to the night of for comedic effect, but that the fact that her parents were uncomfortable with him being in pictures was the reason she gave him.
I’d recommend checking out the article and the video for yourself, since I don’t have the word count to explain all the ways in which Malone and Minhaj disagree. Essentially, Minhaj criticizes the lack of proper fact-checking in the article, while Malone stands by the story and maintains that it was carefully fact-checked. The problem, I think, lies elsewhere — not in the facts themselves but in the way they were displayed in the article.
Minhaj is certainly not exempt from criticism, and, in fact, there is a section in the middle of the article about the issues faced by female staff on “Patriot Act” that feels way more worthy of attention than a comedian fabricating stories to make their shows more compelling. Making up or fudging stories is something that A LOT of comedians do, so why focus solely on Minhaj if the point is to comment on the issue of story fabrications in comedy?
Not only is the article limited in scope, but it falls into two other journalistic pitfalls. Malone talks about how she interviewed over 20 different people, but the vast majority of those sources are anonymous. While anonymous sources are sometimes necessary, having more of your sources unnamed than named in an article about something so relatively trivial as a comedian making up stories can make your article seem unreliable. Malone also takes Minhaj’s quotes out of context or paraphrases them in a way that makes them lose the original meaning, like in the example above.
Many journalists have the urge to write stories that matter, that reveal some sort of hidden issue in society. This urge to tell important stories is good, but it can lead writers down a narrow path when writing and thus cause them to manipulate the information they gathered to tell a specific side of the story. However, accuracy is at the core of journalism, and reporters have a duty to faithfully represent what sources tell them to minimize harm. In a lot of cases, there are higher stakes than whether Hasan Minhaj gets to host “The Daily Show.”
Though, even in the small stakes scenarios, accurately reporting the facts is still important, like with the Trinitonian. We don’t want to do any harm to the Trinity community by misrepresenting information. We know that we are far from perfect and that there are a long list of times in which we have published stories with errors, chopped-up quotes and improper paraphrasing, and we don’t have a professional fact-checking team like the New Yorker. But we do have you, our readers. Please send us any corrections you notice that we need to make, or submit letters to the editor or guest columns reacting to our content. All the information on how you can do that can be found on page two of our print copies.
