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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX.
Stream on Hulu. The date was April 26th, 2002, and I was interviewing the biggest celebrity I ever talked to at that point in my young life. Here's what he had to say. You know, there's no real edge in gratuitous slamming of people. There's a certain school of comedy that mistakes edge for the obnoxious.
I find that the best comedy, the most edgy stuff, is rooted in a way of thinking about something that other people haven't come to yet. To me, that's edgy. Edgy isn't calling Carol Channing a coke whore. Stepping over the line just to step over the line isn't anything anymore. The truth is, in a society like ours, there really isn't much of a line anymore. There's not much you can't do that's not allowed.
That was then Daily Show host Jon Stewart talking to me in an interview for an online college magazine. Stewart is, of course, long gone from normal TV as his era from when The Daily Show was the most dominant force in comedy about news. I really can't express how much you've all missed out by not having it this past decade if you're younger than me.
But now the show is trying to find a rebirth, and they had a young comedian in mind to host it, even to the point of contracts and finalized discussions, until something big happened. In this case, a big story from The New Yorker, which exposed the lies at the center of comedian Hasan Minhaj's stand-up and anecdotes over the course of years.
The New Yorker piece, written by Claire Malone, was titled "Hassan Minaj's Emotional Truths." In his stand-up specials, the former Patriot Act host often recounts harrowing experiences he's faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. The sub had read, "Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?" The piece dropped in September, and here's a description of it that we published at The Spectator.
Much of the New Yorker piece focuses on Minaj's 2022's Netflix stand-up special, The King's Jester, which was marketed as a biographical account of his formative years. In the special, Minaj paints a harrowing tale of a white FBI informant who infiltrated his local mosque in Sacramento some 20 years earlier, when Minaj, now 37, was a teenager.
This informant, who went by the name of "Brother Eric," attempted to coerce Minaj and his friends into talking about jihad. "I was 16 years old. It's 2002. I'll never forget this. So I'm a junior.
And during fourth period, my dad pulls me out of school and he takes me to Friday prayer. And I'm in the back of the mosque and in the middle of the sermon, this super ripped white guy shows up to the mosque. Just bald, all trapped, no neck, barbed wire tattoo. Dude, he looked roided out. He's just like, "Hi, I'm Brother Eric. I'm here to convert to Islam." And my dad's like, "Hasan, you see that? It's a miracle."
That's the power of Islam. Blue eyes, strong. He wants to be a Muslim. I'm like, "Dad, Eric is a federal agent." Except this never happened, which Minaj now readily admits. Minaj wanted to remind his audience just how dangerous it is to be Muslim in America and implicitly how white people make his and his loved ones' lives so dangerous.
He spun another tall tale about a letter being sent to his home filled with white powder. The contents, which Minaj assumed to be anthrax, accidentally spilled onto his daughter. Terrified, Minaj and his wife did what any loving parents would do. They rushed their little girl to the hospital.
Upon investigation, there's no hospital record and no police record. Yet again, something that never happened, which he now admits. The headline about this from Variety, by the way, Hasan Minhaj admits to embellishing stand-up stories, including Daughter's anthrax-sick air, quote, "...the punchline is worth the fictionalized premise."
Now, no one in their right mind thinks that when a comic is telling a story about a personal experience, that they're telling the full truth. Of course, they're exaggerating, leaving things out, making things up to suit their jokes. Comedians are drunks and addicts, and they also make up stuff all the time out of whole cloth. But there is now an expectation that when they tell us a story involving real people, we assume they'll be a little more truthful.
Hasan Minhaj is kind of a perfect example of this because he's been a darling of the press corps. He's a Time 100 guy. He's been the guest of honor at the White House Correspondents Dinner where he said, quote, we should not allow any conservatives into the White House, unquote.
And a bunch of other media-focused events have picked him to be the emcee or the entertainment. And instead, he's turned to lecturing the people in the room. That puts him into this truth-teller category where we really shouldn't stick comics, especially comics who, it turns out, have a very tenuous relationship with the truth in order to make a point.
Minaj responded to this last week with a lengthy YouTube video that tried to use emails and other interactions to make the case that the New Yorker piece was sensationalized and a hit piece on him.
But no less a lefty outlet than Slate said he failed. Their verdict, quote, almost everything the New Yorker article alleges appears to line up with Minaj's versions of the facts, except for some of the details of the prom date story. We'll get to that in a second. A failure at comedy, a failure at fact correction, and a failure at telling the truth. He's a triple threat. By making so many comedians the arbiters of truth in the post-John Stewart era, we blurred the lines of expectations.
If I was just a normal news consumer, I might think Minaj's anecdotes about major public figures, he's got more about the Saudi ambassador, Jared Kushner, etc., were accurate. Because I'm a skeptic, and it sounds too perfect for his emotional truth, I'd have been skeptical even without the New Yorker discovering so much of this are lies. His lies about his ex-girlfriend, which seemed to be the most sociopathic and resentful, I might not have known about without the New Yorker's reporting, though.
Here was the take from comedians Andrew Schultz and Akash Singh. Hassan Minhaj may have been fabricating some things in his Netflix specials. It's not like he was using these exaggerations or hyperbole as punchlines. He was using them to kind of make the audience feel worse about him. And then it turns out these things didn't actually happen. He was supposed to go to prom with a white girl, got to the door, she's putting a corsage on another guy, a white guy. Oh, wow. Because her parents didn't like the fact
that Hasan was Indian. The lady responds and is like, not only is this not true, he asked me days before the prom, I just said no. And not only are my parents not racist, I'm married to an Indian. Bro, I need to have that level of confidence, bro. Where if you don't like me, you're racist. The only way you could not like me. Don't you wish? Objectively. You wish you had that. She gotta be fat. If you know his real life, he has these insane things that have happened
Back in 2016, I was at a radio and TV awards dinner where Hasan Minhaj was the paid speaker.
I hate events like this. I usually boycott them. But honestly, I was less than a year into dating the woman I wanted to be my wife. And you do stuff at that stage that you regret sometimes. It was amazing how he was both speaking about the need for truth telling and then utterly botched the fact that was at the key center point of his speech. Listen to this. Not tweet, not tell us about your thoughts and prayers to write rules to make our society better. And ultimately it comes down to money and influence.
And right now, since 1998, the NRA has given $3.7 million to Congress. There are 294 sitting members of Congress that have accepted contributions from the NRA, and that doesn't even include the millions of dollars from outside lobbying. So before I get up here in my liberal bubble and I ask for
gun control and universal background checks and banning assault rifles. We gotta be able to have the conversation. And right now, specifically Congress, has blocked legislation for the CDC to study gun-related violence. We can't even talk about the issue with real statistics and facts. So I don't know if this is like a Kickstarter thing, but if $3.7 million can buy political influence to take lives, if we raise $4 million
Would you guys take that to save lives? I don't know. Ultimately, I just got to ask you this. Look, when I got into comedy, when you guys got into media, and when you guys got into politics, we wanted to do the best work we could possibly do. And is this what you want your legacy to be? That you were a could-have-done-something Congress, but you didn't because of outside lobbying? That you were complicit in the deaths of thousands of Americans?
And look, I know being a member of Congress is hard. You got to placate your base. You got to look out for reelection. You got to answer to lobbyists. But please persevere because our thoughts and prayers are with you. I wrote at the time last night, The Daily Show's Hasan Minhaj speaking to a gathering of radio and TV journalists went on an extended rant about Orlando, which included the statement that Congress is bought by the NRA
to the tune of $3.7 million over the past decade, suggesting that if the journalists in the room could use Kickstarter to raise $4 million, it would alter our national gun policy.
Even given the normal assumptions regarding the inaccuracies of a fake journalist, this is a ludicrously inaccurate statistic, but in an amusing way. Minaj apparently conflated the dollars given with the fact that the NRA has 3.7 million members. They actually have far more now since the Obama presidency has led to a boom, but a search of 3.7 million turns that up frequently and is an awfully specific number to get totally wrong.
The NRA, of course, gives far more than $3.7 million a year to Congress because they represent far more Americans than Minaj apparently recognizes. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
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Reporting live from under my blanket, I'm Susan Curtis with Dunkin' at Home. Breaking news, pumpkin spice iced and hot coffees are back. I'll pass it to Mr. Curtis with his blanket for the full story. That is so right, Susan. You know, it's never too early to get in a spicy mood. I'm talking cinnamony goodness that's so tasty, people don't want to leave their blankets either. Back to you. No, back to you. All you. The home with Dunkin' Pumpkin Spice is where you want to be.
The point is that in outsourcing this weird combo of moral judgment and fact-checking to people who are responsible for neither Malone's piece and the New Yorker includes a whole portion on the fact-checkers working for Minaj getting kicked out of the writing room because they kept confusing him with facts and killing the jokes was a huge mistake. But it happened because the media failed in the first place.
So instead, they turned to people who could say what they wanted without having the responsibility of being accurate. Clown nose on, clown nose off. Oh, I was inaccurate? That was just a bit. That may work in sports commentary, but it doesn't work when you're cited as a top news source from the people who don't know any better.
The latest addition to this is the young Taylor Tomlinson replacing the departed James Corden. She is a rare female comic in the all-white, all-male, all-drabbly disingenuous and unfunny world of late-night hosts, populated by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and kind of John Oliver, but not really.
Jon Stewart himself had his Apple+ show cancelled, reportedly because he was a little too fact-based when it came to talking about China. That's a big no-no if you take money from Tim Cook and Apple, who have beheld and worshipped the one true faith arising in the East. Tomlinson was consistently, and is now occasionally, a funny and entertaining comedian. She's just fine. But she really took off after she turned against her own.
As one headline described it, "Taylor Tomlinson got cancelled by church, then her comedy career exploded." That's not really accurate, but the headline's from the Daily Beast so you don't really expect it to be. But for a flavor of her current approach to comedy, just listen to this: "I'm not religious anymore. I have had some friends find religion as adults recently, which is very upsetting.
If you grew up religious and you're not anymore and your adult friends find religion, it feels like God is your shitty ex-boyfriend who's now getting it together for your friend and you just have to watch it happen on Facebook. Like, have you met God? He's amazing. I'm like, yeah, I grew up with God. He's a douchebag, all right? Did he tell you you were broken and you need him? That's his move. That's what he does.
He says that to everybody. Don't drink what he gives you. You drink that, next thing you know, you're eating his body, the Holy Spirit's inside you. It's a whole system they have over at that frat house they call church. Who else uses Roman numerals? That joke makes it sound like I resent my religious upbringing. And I do, so I nailed it. But...
Look, I wish Taylor Tomlinson the best in her new job. But from my perspective, there's a reason late night went from being something that was defining as an American cultural aspect shared by so many of us offering humor and commentary and entertainment that brought us together and the laughter and the stupid and the silly sort of responses to what we saw in the world around us to the dumb, factless, vindictive, partisan wasteland it is today.
Late Night Today is as depressing as Stephen Colbert talking about Neutral Milk Hotel with Jerry Seinfeld, which is a real thing that happened. Existing is a complete... What a trial. One of my favorite Richard Pryor lines has been about racism. He says, you know, forget about racism. It's hard enough just being a person. Do you know the band Neutral Milk Hotel? Is that an antacid? No, no.
He's got a song and one of the lines is, and someday we will die and our ashes will fly from the airplane over the sea. And when we meet on a cloud, I'll be laughing out loud. I'll be laughing with everyone I see. Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all. I really love that idea of how strange it is to be. Okay, Jerry. Yes, it really is too much. How about we get back to comedy with jokes that are funny? It's a crazy idea, I know.
but it just might. I'm Ben Domenech. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
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