Emotional Truths and Consequences
“Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth,” he said. “My comedy Arnold Palmer is seventy percent emotional truth—this happened—and then thirty percent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.”
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.
You're saying it's a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.
Dear Wags,
Human beings, every one of us, lie. We lie to spare feelings and to hurt them. We lie when it hardly matters and we lie for survival. We lie for grand ideas and for self-aggrandizement. We lie most expertly to ourselves.
We have invented convoluted structures to contain inveterate dishonesty, but until recently, one of the more effective tools was shame. In 2023, shamelessness abounds. At this point, we should be inured to the brazen grift, but it remains unsettling. When someone lies to our faces, we feel not simply betrayal but the nausea of recognition. It is a very familiar crime.
Hasan Minhaj is a comic, not a politician or a journalist. Entertainers have been known to embellish. But he is a fabulist in a particularly unnerving way. As Clare Malone soberly reports in The New Yorker, Minhaj concocted elements of his life story in service to his social commentary. These stories have to do with being an Indian American Muslim and are meant to illustrate how trying that can be.
Anecdotes Minhaj shares about his life — among them being jilted on a prom date’s doorstep because of his ethnicity, being entrapped by an FBI informant who infiltrated his mosque after 9/11, and living through an episode in which he feared his young daughter had been exposed to anthrax—are inventions. Like many people in the public eye, he has received death threats, but the menacing tweets he displayed on a screen behind him for his special The King’s Jester were not real. He told Malone these distortions are acceptable because they are “grounded in truth.”
Oh, that again: The lie that shivs facts in for the sizzle of feeling. That lie that scores points for the team while helping you get ahead. The lie that allows you to take the moral high ground. How familiar we are with such deceit, and its knack for undermining the causes it purports to serve.
We are told lived experience is some kind of epistemological trump card, but it seems imagined experience will do just as well. Better, actually, because it can be tweaked to hit all the high notes. It is very possible that as the son of an organic chemist growing up in the college town of Davis, California, Minhaj was dealt many unfairnesses. Perhaps they were not cinematic enough. “No, I don’t think I’m manipulating [audiences],” he told Malone. “I think they are coming for the emotional roller-coaster ride….To the people that are, like, ‘Yo, that is way too crazy to happen,’ I don’t care because yes, fuck yes—that’s the point.”
If that is the point, there is an instrument for making it called fiction. If we are all in on a joke, relevant details are shared in advance. If the point is a rollercoaster ride, not reality, why not tack up a sign at the ticket booth? Because what really drives numbers is real-life drama, the sensational biography that is depressingly proved too good to be true. We reward personal narrative above all, because it is authentic, because we cannot grok crime statistics and economic studies, because we furiously want to be confirmed in how we feel, because we make a bizarre fetish of persecution. Over and over, we swallow fresh hoaxes and then play gotcha with the latest hoaxer. It is a depressing sport, for a republic of frauds.
Minhaj is in contention to host The Daily Show, our most celebrated comedy series about politics. It serves up an essential form of satire, which in the hands of Jon Stewart and others, became extremely influential. In ancient times (the last Bush administration) this brand of infotainment was transformed into a primary news source, a way of pre-bunking the Official Story without having read it.
In the Trump years, political commentary and comedy became ever more tightly entwined. The Great Deceiver pummeled us with calumny and traditional methods of ingesting information were cast aside. The Daily Show pose, once a counterpoint to the official story, is everywhere. Not just in old late-night monologues but infused through cable news, podcasts, and social media. Meanwhile, the plain old news, that dull root from which all snarky takes bloom, shrivels.
In 2005, a Daily Show alumni, Stephen Colbert, coined the now-creaky term truthiness to describe the quality of believing something to be true because you feel it should be, regardless of facts. It was then mostly used to describe the wish casting of conservatives. Minhaj, the last person Stewart hired as a Daily Show correspondent, a Peabody award-winner for his Netflix series, Patriot Act, and a leading contender to be a successor host to Trevor Noah, has been caught being truthy. His manipulations are not grounded in fact but fan service.
When comedians are hit by controversy, they have a solid defense, which is that they are merely entertainers. Comics ought to be given a wide berth to say what they please. Memories and memoirs do get hazy. But the basis of Minhaj's performances was that he was relating what he, not a character, lived through, and by doing so, he was speaking truth to power. His tall tales involved real people doing lousy things. Representing that your child was covered in white powder sent to you by a racist, when that never happened, does not serve comedy, tolerance, or our increasingly tenuous hold on reality.
All of this may have no lasting effect on Minhaj’s career. We’ve all grown exhausted by culture war call-outs and condemnation, by the impulse to chase people off the stage for mistakes. There are real horrors grounded in actual truth to worry about. Ambition clouds judgment, and lying is only human. Still, it cannot be spun into something righteous. It does not liberate the oppressed or nudge society closer to some definition of justice. It can be only what it is, which is small and contemptible.
Yours Ever,
Thomas Stockmann
