Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last weekend, Hasan Minhaj turned to the crowd at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, after finishing a bit about his ex cheating on him in the 11th grade and said, "Don't fact-check me." The audience went wild. The comedian was referring to an article published in The New Yorker in September, Hasan Minhaj's Emotional Truths, in which journalist Clare Malone fact-checked moments from his standup specials. For example, Minhaj had an extended bit about being rejected on prom night on his date's doorstep.

Hasan Minhaj: Mrs. Reed opens the door. She has this look of concern on her face, and she's like, "Oh my God, honey, did Bethany not tell you? Ah, sweetie, we love you. We think you're great, and we love that you come over and study, but tonight is one of those nights where we have a lot of family back home in Nebraska and we're going to be taking a lot of photos tonight, so we don't think it'd be a good fit."

Brooke Gladstone: The New Yorker found that the doorstep moment never happened as such. Minhaj owned up to this in a 21-minute response video posted on YouTube in late October.

Hasan Minhaj: Bethany's mom did really say that. It was just a few days before prom and I created the doorstep scene to drop the audience into the feeling of that moment.

Brooke Gladstone: In another routine, Minhaj describes receiving an envelope filled with white powder in the mail after a critical Patriot Act segment on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Narendra Modi Hindu nationalism. He said the powder fell into his daughter's stroller.

Hasan Minhaj: It falls on my daughter's shoulder, her neck, her cheeks, and she's staring at me. We rushed down to NYU and the moment they see the baby, they just rip the clothes off her and they take her away.

Brooke Gladstone: The New Yorker found no record of this emergency room visit. Minhaj admits it didn't happen though he says he did open an envelope full of white powder with his daughter, and the threats to his family's safety were genuine.

Hasan Minhaj: This is all terrifying, so why embellish? Why even say you took your daughter to the hospital? The night of the athletics Bina and I, we got into a huge argument and she kept asking Hasan, "What if this powder fell on our daughter?" I created the hospital scene to put the audience in that same shock and fear that me and Bina felt playing out that night.

Brooke Gladstone: The New Yorker has stood behind its story, which he calls misleading. During his performance at the Beacon, Minhaj said, "I had to go head-to-head with one of the most dangerous organizations in the world." He didn't mean perhaps the most storied magazine in the country, nor journalism unbridled. He meant a brutish power, never, ever threatened in the real world or challenged in the digital one. He said, "I'm talking about a White woman with a keyboard." The crowd went even wilder. The controversy covered by almost every major news outlet and woven into several jokes in Minhaj's latest comedy special demonstrates how a minor scandal in deaf hands can be successfully leveraged. It also brings into question what audiences expect from comedians, especially ones who do John Stewart-style political commentary.

Hasan Minhaj: I thought I had two different expectations built into my work, my work as a storytelling comedian, and my work as a political comedian where facts always come first. That is why the fact-checking on Patriot Act was extremely rigorous, but in my work as a storytelling comedian, I assumed that the lines between truth and fiction were allowed to be a bit more blurry.

Brooke Gladstone: Jesse David Fox is a senior editor at Vulture, host of Good One, a podcast about jokes, and the author of Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work. Welcome to the show, Jesse.

Jesse David Fox: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: It's pretty commonplace for comedians to exaggerate or twist the truth for the sake of a more entertaining story in their standup performances. What do you think The New Yorker article and the reactions to it tell us about the perceptions of truth in comedy in 2023?

Jesse David Fox: The tension of the story is that a comedian would exaggerate, and that might be a newsworthy bit of information, and that implies that there is a large segment of the general audience who consumes comedy, who does not think of a comedian as a person with the artistic license to make things up. I think there's a tendency to think of comedians as just talking up there. Even while comedy has gotten more and more ambitious in its structure, there still is a tendency to not really investigate the nature of how they're talking.

Brooke Gladstone: As you yourself wrote, "No one is going to question whether what Mike Birbiglia says about his life is true. When you are centering yourself in a story about racial discrimination, pain that you experienced and then you exaggerate it, you embroider it to make the prejudice seem even more egregious." Isn't that precisely the occasion when the contract with the comedy audience shifts and genuine naked honesty is called for?

Jesse David Fox: Hasan in his defense is arguing that what he's conveying to the audience is correct, but in so much as an artist is trying to communicate their truth to people, if them knowing the factual truth would completely delegitimize the story, then I do think there's something to think about. I think it's also impacted by the fact that Hasan is a comedian whose other job is being in the political space. This show is not an apolitical work. It is a political work with a point it is making.

Brooke Gladstone: We are hearing a story that's horrible made more horrible so that we can feel more horrible about it. I don't know.

Jesse David Fox: It feels weird at minimum.

Brooke Gladstone: It feels weird.

Jesse David Fox: We never really, as a society determine the ethics of art, but our stomach can feel like, "Oh, this is not what we agreed to." I think broken contract is correct.

Brooke Gladstone: In your book, you track audiences evolving expectations of truth and authenticity in comedy, you mark the sick comedians of the mid-20th century as turning points in the role of truth in comedy. Mort Sahl used to take newspapers up onto the stage and obviously, there were plenty of moments in Lenny Bruce's monologues that weren't funny. Talk to me about the sick comedians and how they engendered the goodwill and regard of their audiences.

Jesse David Fox: They're reacting to the comedy of the 1940s and early 1950s that was still rooted in very traditional joke writing structure and club comedians performing sometimes stock material and not coming from a personal perspective. In the late 1950s with the rise of what would become-- called the sick comedians, Andy Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, all had certain versions of, this is a personal expression and that is a tremendous evolution, probably the largest evolution in the history of comedy. From personal expression, you assume they're a truthful expression.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk just, say, 10, 20 years after the sick comedians about Richard Pryor say, and George Carlin who became experts at performing their authentic personas while highlighting social inequities.

Jesse David Fox: Richard Pryor is to me, the avatar in a lot of different definitions of when we think of in terms of truth and comedy because he's both being really frank about race relations in America in a way that comedians weren't doing in the same way.

Richard Pryor: Police got a chokehold they use out here though, man, they choke niggas to death. That mean you be dead when they through. Did you know that? Wait a minute. Niggas going, "Yes, we knew." White folks, "No, I had no idea."

Jesse David Fox: Then there is the truth of how he investigated himself in a way that really had never been seen. That level of vulnerability really pushed the art form forward. By being so vulnerable, by being so truthful seemingly in his discussion of his personal life. That then gives you a certain credibility when you're talking about politics or race.

Brooke Gladstone: Talk about vulnerability, you wrote about Tig Notaro going on stage just after the death of her mother and her own cancer diagnosis.

Tig Notaro: I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer. How are you?

Brooke Gladstone: Then you talked about Margaret Cho's struggles on her TV show to try to conform to how TV execs expected her to look, or Maria Bamford doing material about mental health in the 2000s.

Maria Bamford: I went into a psychiatric facility, which if you haven't been don't feel bad if you go and they're uniformly awful. You're not at the wrong one. They're all bad.

Brooke Gladstone: These women you wrote confront the popular idea of what it means to be fearless on stage. Fearless is often used to describe comics unafraid of hurting people when it should apply to comedians afraid of being hurt by people and persisting anyway.

Jesse David Fox: What all those comedians did is genuinely risk ramifications. If you just come down from a high and go, here's my truth, it's unquestioned. This is the truth. It's not actually vulnerable. You're not actually going to get to something universal. If you leave yourself open to the audience, you're going to be able to find something deeper. Actually, being a pervert and maybe having a string of sexual misconduct has a long history of not actually affecting one's career, where physical illness, a history of mental illness, does have a long history of affecting people's careers. Especially in a place like Hollywood that is looking for reasons not to work with people. That is the difference, which is not just saying this is the truth, it's unquestioned. It's basically like truth is a sometimes abstract idea that we're going to find together.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about Louis C.K. You wrote that he had a breakthrough after his first kid was born that transformed his up to that point not very impressive career. You write that in the story of comedy's march to be taken more seriously. CK was for nearly a decade, its avatar. At the center of the celebration was truth that the Los Angeles Review of Books called him television's most honest man.

Louis C.K: You know what's really sad about men? That we can't have a beautiful thought about a woman that isn't followed by a disgusting thought about that same woman. We're not capable of it. We can't do one and not the other.

Jesse David Fox: Louis CK was taken extremely seriously in a way comedians really hadn't been before. There's a lot of reasons for it. A lot of it was this idea of how honest he was on stage.

Brooke Gladstone: That sometimes he thought his daughter was a real a-hole.

Jesse David Fox: Yes. Stuff like that, or describing what it's like to clean the diaper of his newborn daughter and confronting that expectation. I do think talking about parenting on stage, that was new. He then used the goodwill of that to then apply it to a lot of work that was not as emotionally vulnerable, which was much more using the feeling of truth to hide in the stakes of jokes. He prefers to say the N-word. Actually say the word, not say the phrase, the N-word.

He has a joke about the C-word and how that word is okay. He has a joke about the F slur and about how that word is okay. In those jokes, he fashions them as progressive. All of those were attempts to use the goodwill he had earned from earlier specials to get away with stuff that I think really is not as truthful as he is fashioning himself to be.

Brooke Gladstone: Then in 2017, The New York Times published a story revealing five accusations of sexual misconduct against him. What does his story reveal about the expectations of truth in comedy?

Jesse David Fox: For a lot of younger people, I think it poisoned the way of projecting yourself as authentic when you have full control of how you're being presented. I think more than anything about being truthful, it's much more about control and controlling the narrative and controlling the perception. You can say, yes, he was being honest, but more so he was trying to manipulate the perception of that honesty in a way where he was still in power and he's still in control. He was not being vulnerable to people calling into question his ethics or his behavior.

Brooke Gladstone: You've marked the appearance of a new era of comedian. Folks like John Early and Kate Berlant respond to this performed authenticity, reacting you say, "against the phoniness of going on stage and acting like what you're saying is authentic."

Kate Berlant: The thing about us is-

John Early: I'm just going to stop you right there because-

Kate Berlant: What's up?

John Early: Oh my God. Kate, this is huge. This is huge.

Kate Berlant: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I've chills. I've chills.

John Early: Oh my God

Kate Berlant: Few people experience this.

John Early: Thank you. If I could go back in time to when we first met. If I could tell those two people, Kate, look how far you're going to come.

Kate Berlant: Don't go there because I'll go here.

Brooke Gladstone: They satirize the idea that it's even possible to be truthful on stage. Is this the way to avoid being called inauthentic to lean into the absurdity of the performance?

Jesse David Fox: It's saying that if you're going on stage and you're performing no matter what, it is more authentic to acknowledge you're performing than it is to pretend you are just telling people about your life. Kate's background, I believe she has a master's in performance studies. It's rooted in people like Judith Butler. Judith Butler is a queer and feminist academic. A lot of what we think of is the idea of the performance of gender comes from their work. They have a book called Gender Trouble. The quote I quote from Gender Trouble is, "Laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived." Meaning that you laugh when you realize we think we're being an authentic person when really, we are performing what we think an authentic person looks like. That then gets heightened on stage where you actually are performing.

Brooke Gladstone: Minhaj is often vulnerable on stage sharing stories about race in America and the discrimination he experienced. The narrative around his success is about what he reveals about the American immigrant experience and racism in the country. He has admitted that he's not great at physical comedy or writing jokes. What he's great at is sincerity.

Jesse David Fox: Yes, and I've talked to him about it. What he can do that may be better than any other comedian ever is look directly into a camera and say something earnest, I think is maybe a better word, and without irony. Truly just directly being like, this is something that happened. This is important. That can be quite impactful and can cause people to have a very strong relationship to him because he's talking directly to you. A lot of comedians aren't doing that, especially not on tape because it's embarrassing almost to be seen as that sincere.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you think that's his vulnerability?

Jesse David Fox: I think it's artistically vulnerable. I do think it is something that he knows comedians would make fun of. I think there is less vulnerability in the nature of how he tells his story.

Brooke Gladstone: It's because he really isn't like the women that we talked about earlier, laying things on the line that could hurt them. This kind of earnest, righteous discussion is, in fact, his brand.

Jesse David Fox: Yes, I think that's fair. I think that criticism of his work existed before The New Yorker story. That's why when The New Yorker story came out, for a lot of people they felt very vindicated because they're like, "Well, I always thought there was something wrong with his work."

Brooke Gladstone: It's been reported that The New Yorker piece may have cost Minhaj The Daily Show host job. Outside of that, do you think it might mark a new turn in the notion of truth in comedy?

Jesse David Fox: It will force the comedians who are in the political sphere whose personal work might not be the same thing, to really have to scrutinize their standup and see if it adheres to the same standards as their shows that at higher fact-checkers and stuff like that. What I hope is somewhere it allows audiences to be where I am, where I don't go into a comedy show worried one way or the other about the factual accuracy of the story and just allow myself to experience it emotionally.

Brooke Gladstone: Conan O'Brien retired, shows like Patriot Act and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Desus & Mero, and Ziwe have been canceled by their networks. It feels like a moment of change for the Stewart brand of political comedy. What do you think is next? What's it feel like? What platform is it on?

Jesse David Fox: The legacy of The Daily Show of people turning to comedic individuals that they trust to provide them information and/or process information in the news and politics is alive and well. Like if you look at podcasts, TikTok, and Instagram, there are just people doing this. It's essentially as our life gets increasingly complicated and we get further removed from each other. Comedians are adept at affirming humanity, at relieving tensions, at making the world seem like it makes sense. Not necessarily fixing problems, but just making it seem like it's manageable.

If you find someone funny, you trust them. Studies show this. It's part of the nature of what we laugh at. It's so rooted in our trusting of other people. It's why we laugh most with our loved ones. That's the thing about the Hasan story that I think is so interesting is after he released the video, you then basically saw a split where who people trusted is who they decided was correct in that story. They both seemingly released examples of manipulation. The New Yorker story was about how Hasan manipulated the truth. Then Hasan released a video about how New Yorker manipulated the truth. Then people just picked a side and that is the media story of this. Where everyone landed is not based on any actual information. It's just based on who they trust.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much, Jesse.

Jesse David Fox: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Jesse David Fox is the author of Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture and the Magic That Makes It Work. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Micah will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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