I wonder if it might be appropriate to frame The New Yorker profile of Hasan Minhaj as a kind of creative scabbing.
To explain (and, let me be clear: this turn of phrase is inspired by an observation someone else made): the author of a piece on Hasan Minhaj also wrote a piece about David Zaslav, the executive who owns CNN, Warner Brothers, what once was HBO, and several other media properties, with the title of the piece characterizing Zaslav as a ‘Hollywood anti-hero.’ The titling editor dubbed him an ‘anti-hero’ during the WGA strike, a strike where — at one point — members of the negotiating committee for The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization representing Zaslav and others, threatened to keep the strike going until the writers ‘lost their apartments.’
The reason why I’m flagging this particular piece is because — at it’s heart — comedy is about, ‘What if?’ at various levels of skill. It’s saying, ‘What about this?’ or ‘What about that?’ over and over and over again. And while we can have differing opinions about whether or not we like Hasan Minhaj’s comedy, that’s really not the point. The point is the strange application of this particular criticism — if we can even call it criticism — to an art form.
Sometimes criticism is about what someone thinks art can be. You can sometimes trace direct thru-lines from criticism to the art that then followed. You can’t get to the French New Wave without Cahiers du Cinema. You can’t not look at Truffaut’s work or Goddard’s work and recognize that they once wrote about Hitchcock’s ‘rhyming shots.’ Fellini literally incorporated some of the criticism he received into 8 1/2.
So what can we actually say about stand-up from a critic’s perspective, of writing that hews a little bit closer to talking about what stand-up actually is? Peter Brook once suggested in The Empty Stage that “theatre is always a self-destructive art, and it is always written on the wind.” P.E. Moskowitz wrote in relation to Nanette in 2018 —
There’s comedy that holds power to account, but instead of getting praised by the media, it’s often ignored, or actively punished. When comedian Jake Flores joked on Twitter earlier this year that white people were allowed to culturally appropriate Cinco de Mayo if they killed an ICE agent, he was visited by several agents from Homeland Security.
And part of Stewart Lee’s whole thing is in pointing out all the different ways the form itself is full of artifice and lies, two examples of which are included here at what I hope are maximally confusing points. (“Why is there a post called ‘Creative Scabbing’ about Hasan Minhaj featuring a header video of Stewart Lee? Did something happen to Stewart Lee? Does he think he’s Minhaj now?”)
Sometimes criticism leaves us curious as to what exactly we’re trying to ask of the world, let alone what we expect it to say in return, and that’s the impression I receive from the writer’s article.
In Minhaj’s approach to comedy, he leans heavily on his own experience as an Asian American and Muslim American, telling harrowing stories of law-enforcement entrapment and personal threats … But, after many weeks of trying, I had been unable to confirm some of the stories that he had told onstage.
One could argue that one of the basic foundational rules of stand-up — of art itself — is that we suspend belief in the name of pleasure. Beethoven’s 9th isn’t an ode to a woman named Joy. Orson Welles didn’t personally become William Randolph Hearst or Joseph Pulitzer. Caravaggio wasn’t personally at the beheading of St. John the Baptist. Picasso’s Guernica isn’t a photograph of what happened during the bombing of Guernica. Bob Dylan’s real name isn’t Bob Dylan. We get this.
If we apply this rule to comedy, we might put it like this: Dave Chapelle did not really see a baby smoking weed, Mitch Hedberg did not actually walk into Target and miss, Richard Pryor was not God coming back and asking where his son was, Eddie Murphy did not transcribe and then recite an exact conversation between an Italian-American and a black man as was depicted in RAW, a driver did not tell Norm MacDonald The Moth joke, Robin Wiliams’s son didn’t actually talk like that, and — you get it.
So — if this is all obvious; if we get it — then why is this an issue with this piece on Minhaj? What ethical line is being crossed? Is it the fact that we’re being asked to suspend our belief in the first place that the writer allegedly finds troubling?
It might be. In reading the piece, the first person quoted is the subject of a bit — a FBI informant who was trying to entrap Muslim-Americans. The informant is quoted as saying, “I have no idea why he [Minhaj] would do that.” Here’s the paragraph in full —
Prior to my meeting with Minhaj, Monteilh, a.k.a. “Brother Eric,” had told me that Minhaj’s story is a fabrication. “I have no idea why he would do that,” Monteilh said. Monteilh was in prison in 2002, and didn’t begin to work for the F.B.I. on counterterrorism measures until 2006. Details of his undercover actions were catalogued in a legal case that has made its way to the Supreme Court. Monteilh said that he’d worked only in Southern California, not the Sacramento area.
The writer lets the comment stand on its own, which tells us that the issue at hand isn’t the fact that someone who worked for the government was trying to entrap everyday citizens. Neighbors. People we might know. The issue isn’t in talking about the choices we all collectively make as to what makes a ‘good’ community or a ‘bad’ community. The issue isn’t about finding a little bit of schadenfreude. The issue appears to be the feelings of the informant who was trying to — in the writer’s words, paraphrasing Minhaj — “entice [local Muslim] boys into talking about jihad.”
Let’s not rush, however. We should do our best to be as fair and as open as possible in judging the work of others. Let’s take a break from this particular piece on Minhaj and look at what the writer had to say about David Zaslav —
Zaslav, whose teeth gleam a startling white and whose wardrobe skews toward Wall Street leisurewear—logoed golf shirts and zip vests—had a reputation as a shrewd dealmaker, adept at brokering acquisitions …
His two primary interests, people who know him well say, are business and his family …
“What we love most about David is how he loves his wife Pam and their beautiful family,” Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper,” wrote not long ago. …
One well-informed industry source told me that Malone came to appreciate Zaslav’s energy and skill as an operator—someone who could execute complicated strategies on the ground.
I sometimes tell my students to think about what’s absolutely necessary before they write what they write, and I can see that this has held true for this writer here. Where else would I learn that the highest paid executive in Hollywood’s primary interests are his family and that — in addition to being interested in his family — he also loves his wife, who I’m told is also part of his family. (Thank you, Home and Gardens Television stars Chip and Joanna Gaines.)
I’m also surprised that the writer elides something that was fairly well-known at the time that also has the end result of making the subject of the piece look good. Here’s a paragraph from the writer —
This spring, Zaslav gave a commencement address at Boston University, where he attended law school. Wearing a red academic robe and sunglasses, he spoke dutifully of the five things he’d learned along the way. “Some people will be looking for a fight,” he warned graduates. “But don’t be the one they find it with.” Outside, the Writers Guild had assembled a picket line. A small plane circled overhead, trailing a banner that read “David Zaslav—Pay Your Writers.”
Here’s how Hollywood Reporter characterized the same scene —
… the chants and booing immediately picked up, followed by what would become a constant ebb and flow of calls throughout his 20-minute speech …
That included screams, shouts and chants from the hundreds of seniors seated as 7,000 degrees were conferred in nearly 350 fields of study Sunday at the event, which started at 1 p.m. ET. “We don’t want you here,” “Pay your writers” and “Shut up, Zaslav” could be heard emanating from the crowd …
At one point, as the WBD CEO joked about giving students life advice, he garnered even more boos and had to repeatedly stop his speech until the waves of cries temporarily died down …
“Some people will be looking for a fight,” Zaslav told BU students around halfway through his speech, to a mix of boos and cheers. “But don’t be the one they find it with. Focus on good people’s qualities. In my career, I’ve seen so many talented people lose opportunities or jobs because they couldn’t get along with others. You can’t choose the people you work with. Figure out what you like about a person — there’s always something — and do whatever it takes to navigate their challenges. We all have them.”
The sentiment garnered an audible uproar, with some students laughing while others continued to shout or even express shock.
The graduating, dissenting students somehow disappeared in The New Yorker profile, as well as their reaction to the line, “Some people will be looking for a fight,” a line that — at the time — felt less like a homily and more like a pointed reference. (Where did the students go in that piece?)
You can make a reasonable argument that the development of realistic fiction is tied to the historical advent of industrialization, but if we look at the economics of our present moment and then look at the story of a man who — amongst other things — was tied to using AI to replace both writers and actors; where we see this man cited at someone with ‘energy and skill’ and who — per knowledgable sources — ‘loves his wife,’ then what can we conclude?
I feel like the answer becomes all the more apparent the more we ping back and forth between these two stories.
The New York Police Department, which investigates incidents of possible Bacillus anthracis, has no record of an incident like the one Minhaj describes, nor do area hospitals. Front-desk and mailroom employees at Minhaj’s former residence don’t remember such an incident, nor do “Patriot Act” employees involved with the show’s security or Minhaj’s security guard from the time.
During our conversation, Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?”
I’ve never seen a writer in The New Yorker literally call the police on a joke. It’s like The Guardian going to Scotland Yard because Stephen Fry made a pun. (And the Latin! We’re sure in Serious Town when we’re breaking out the Latin, aren’t we? Fibula throni cinguli, quod certum non habebant in Roma antiqua.) It brings to mind something I read somewhere ages ago about how pre-Revolutionary France would throw books in literal jail cells.
But was his invention of a traumatic experience with his child or with law-enforcement entrapment distasteful, given the moral heft of those things, and the fact that other people have actually experienced them? “It’s grounded in truth,” Minhaj said.
“But it didn’t happen to you,” I replied.
“I think what I’m ultimately trying to do is highlight all of those stories,” he said. “Building to what I think is a pointed argument,” as opposed to a “pointless riff” of jokes.
I don’t know if I agree with the writer that “the stakes appear to change when entertainers fabricate anecdotes about current events and issues of social injustice.” Edmund Morris’s fabrications at the heart of Dutch didn’t make it a less effective biography of Ronald Reagan. I also don’t know how I feel about the use of ‘distasteful,’ which strikes me as a very telling word, particularly in light of the really quite ho-hum description of Minhaj coming up with the kind of lame joke in the first place, let alone the pride of placement given to ‘Brother Eric’ to offer the sympathetic line, ‘I don’t know why he did that.’
There are other things worth talking about in this piece — the experience of women working at Patriot Act being the big, obvious one — but there are so many other issues with the overall piece itself that it does a disservice to the full breadth of their potential story. I’m honestly more interested in hearing from them than hearing from a writer who wants to make the case that that lie told in an art form riddled with lies was — in fact — a lie.
You can see Minhaj’s response to the article below.