Hasan Minhaj has admitted to playing fast and loose with the truth. A new report from The New Yorker claims that the comedian and former Patriot Act host embellished or fabricated some stories about his harrowing experiences with racism and Islamophobia as a practicing Muslim from an Indian family; the stories were often found in his stand-up comedy and featured in his comedy specials. In an interview with The New Yorker’s Clare Malone for the report, Minhaj admitted that some of his stand-up material was, in fact, not entirely true. “The emotional truth is first,” said Minhaj. “The factual truth is secondary.”
“Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth,” Minhaj told Malone. “My comedy Arnold Palmer is 70% emotional truth—this happened—and then 30% hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.”
Malone, who wrote the report and conducted the interview, could not verify a handful of major stories relayed in Minhaj’s comedy, ones in which he claimed to have experienced a racist or Islamophobic incident. In his 2017 Netflix special, Homecoming King, Minhaj recounted asking a white girl to prom and going to her doorstep to pick her up the night of the dance, only to find someone else putting a corsage on her wrist. As he told it, she went back on his prom invitation because her parents didn’t want their daughter to take pictures with a “brown boy.”
The would-be prom date, however, disputed certain aspects of Minhaj’s story, saying she turned him down days ahead of the event. She added that Minhaj hadn’t made enough effort to hide her identity, leading her to face online threats and doxxing for years after the special. While Minhaj admitted to her version of the prom events, he homed in on the “emotional truth” of the situation, saying his version of the story resonated because “there are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience.”
In Minhaj’s 2022 Netflix stand-up special, The King’s Jester, the comedian told a story about a white man named “Brother Eric” who converted to Islam and joined Minhaj’s family’s Sacramento-area mosque in 2002, when Minhaj was a junior in high school. As Minhaj told it, “Brother Eric” wound up being an FBI informant actually named Craig Monteilh, who had reported Minhaj’s mosque to authorities, leading police officers to show up at the mosque and pin Minhaj to the hood of a car.
However, The New Yorker’s reporting found that entire story to be false: Craig Monteilh, a.k.a. “Brother Eric,” was in prison in 2002, the year Minhaj claimed to have met him, and didn’t become an FBI counterterrorism informant until 2006; Monteilh said he had never worked for the FBI in the Sacramento area, only in Southern California. “I have no idea why he would do that,” Monteilh told The New Yorker. Speaking to Malone at a comedy club in the West Village, Minhaj admitted that the “Brother Eric” story was made up and that it was based on “a hard foul he received during a game of pickup basketball in his youth,” when he and other Muslim teens played against middle-aged men whom they believed to be police officers.
In another anecdote from the same special, Minhaj claimed that an envelope containing white powder was mailed to his home, and that he opened it and accidentally spilled it on his young daughter. Unsure whether it was anthrax, Minhaj rushed his daughter to the hospital, and she turned out to be unharmed. The New Yorker found that no such event took place, and Minhaj admitted that it did not, though he claimed the story was based on a time when he received a real letter containing a powdery substance. Minhaj maintained that although both of the King’s Jester stories were only based on “emotional truths,” “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”
“No, I don’t think I’m manipulating,” Minhaj told The New Yorker. “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.”
Minhaj has his defenders. Comedian and former Patriot Act writer Ismael Loutfi told The New Yorker that he believes his former boss was well within his right to embellish certain stories and aspects of his life. “Maybe it’s just three or four facts he combined into one,” Loutfi said. “Every stand-up you see who’s telling any joke, there is an element of truth, but then the thing that provokes laughter is dishonest. I can see how you would find it sort of disreputable, but at the same time I don’t think that that’s a story I’ve heard anyone talk about.”
Minhaj has made a name for himself with political comedy that often centers on issues surrounding Islamophobia and South Asian identity. Before hosting the Emmy- and Peabody-winning Patriot Act, Minhaj was a correspondent on The Daily Show. He headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2017 and was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2019. He also recently had a long sit-down interview with former president Barack Obama. Following Trevor Noah’s departure, Minhaj did a stint as guest host of The Daily Show in March, and he is now rumored to be a front-runner to take over the full-time hosting gig.
Minhaj delivered the following statement to Vanity Fair when asked for comment:
“All my stand-up stories are based on events that happened to me. Yes, I was rejected from going to prom because of my race. Yes, a letter with powder was sent to my apartment that almost harmed my daughter. Yes, I had an interaction with law enforcement during the war on terror. Yes, I had varicocele repair surgery so we could get pregnant. Yes, I roasted Jared Kushner to his face. I use the tools of stand-up comedy—hyperbole, changing names and locations, and compressing timelines to tell entertaining stories. That’s inherent to the art form. You wouldn’t go to a haunted house and say, ‘Why are these people lying to me?’—the point is the ride. Stand-up is the same.”
