"In his standup specials, the former “Patriot Act” host often recounts harrowing experiences he’s faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. Does it matter that much of it never happened to...
"In his standup specials, the former “Patriot Act” host often recounts harrowing experiences he’s faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?"
Yes. I was initially unsure about how I would answer this question, but a bit of quick thought makes me pretty confident that I do believe that using a lie to advance an agenda is not a good thing, whether it is an agenda I agree with or not. I've seen Minaj's specials, and enjoyed them, and took the opportunity to reflect on the morals of his stories. His stories certainly did seem to pack more of a punch when they were told with him as the protagonist, than they might have if he just relayed the story as happened to someone else.
However, I often feel disgusted by how right-wing pundits use lies and half-truths to advance their agenda, which I definitely do not agree with. So, I can't, in good conscience, condone using lies and half-truths to advance an agenda which I might happen to agree with.
If Minaj was upfront about his act being fables, rather than truthful stories, I'd have more respect for it. Transparency is an important part of being righteous, in my opinion.
Yes, I always assume most standup comedian stories are made up, and that's generally fine, but there's a big difference between making up some trivial thing that happened at a bar to set up a good...
Yes, I always assume most standup comedian stories are made up, and that's generally fine, but there's a big difference between making up some trivial thing that happened at a bar to set up a good joke, and making up a detailed story about a real person to advance a political point. The former is purely for entertainment and similar to stage magicians "lying" about a trick, and the latter is actually lying to thousands of people who would probably be upset to know you lied.
I think Minhaj clearly thinks of himself as a comedian first and that's why he sees this as ok, as he says “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise". That is usually true, and that's probably what all his comedian friends and influences have taught him, but what he's doing is more than just setting up a punchline. “I think they are coming for the emotional roller-coaster ride.” No they aren't, if that's what you want you watch a movie or a "reality" show that you basically know is fake. That is not how standup comedy is presented and generally thought of.
The mixing of definitive factual information like a news article about an FBI agent mixed with narrative based jokes is a problem, I think. I understand that comedians tend toward hyperbole, and...
But Minhaj had Brother Eric pegged from the beginning. Eventually, Brother Eric tried to entice the boys into talking about jihad. Minhaj decided to mess with Brother Eric, telling him that he wanted to get his pilot’s license. Soon, the police were on the scene, slamming Minhaj against the hood of a car. Years later, while watching the news with his father, Minhaj saw a story about Craig Monteilh, who assumed the cover of a personal trainer when he became an F.B.I. informant in Muslim communities in Southern California. “Well, well, well, Papa, look who it is,” Minhaj recalls telling his father. “It’s our good friend Brother Eric.”
Onstage, a large screen behind Minhaj flashes news footage from an Al Jazeera English report on Monteilh. Minhaj’s teen-age hunch, it seems, was proved right. The moment is played for laughs, but the story underscores the threat that being Muslim in the United States carried during the early days of the war on terror.
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.
The mixing of definitive factual information like a news article about an FBI agent mixed with narrative based jokes is a problem, I think.
I understand that comedians tend toward hyperbole, and sometimes they also mix in real messages. I dont think Dave Chappelle actually met a weed selling baby on a street corner at 2 AM, but I don't think he was trying to make it seem like he really did, even if on the whole his comedy was making a genuine point about living as a black american in some of his jokes.
But throwing a real guy on screen and then tying him to a maybe fabricated story about yourself where he is the bad guy seems like very irresponsible behavior.
In one instance, Minhaj grew frustrated that fact-checking was stymying the creative flow during a final rewrite, and a pair of female researchers were asked to leave the writers’ room. They sat in the hall for more than an hour, listening to the meeting continue without them, and later had to scramble to insert factual revisions. Later in the show’s run, researchers were no longer invited into the writers’ room for rewrites—only the male head of the research department was allowed in. Women researchers said that they felt shunted to the side
This part feels kinda inflammatory. So the head of research was the only person allowed in. The women researchers felt shunted to the side. So were the men researchers just cool with being shunted aside, or were all men allowed in and the women were excluded? Because it sounds like fact checkers in general were being pushed out, but its making it sound like a sexism thing.
I read this part and realized how much cope Minhaj is engaged in. This is the problem Hasan! The reason we're fine with people making shit up for stand-up bits is because it's in service to a...
But throwing a real guy on screen and then tying him to a maybe fabricated story about yourself where he is the bad guy seems like very irresponsible behavior.
I read this part and realized how much cope Minhaj is engaged in.
“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.
This is the problem Hasan! The reason we're fine with people making shit up for stand-up bits is because it's in service to a pointless joke. The fabrications are okay when there's no point to it. But when you're trying to make a point and support an argument about how the world actually looks it needs to be based on references to the world as it actually is. Building your point on a foundation of stuff you just made up is. . . well lying.
The other point is just the general focus on self-aggrandizement when he does fabricate stuff.
But, according to a producer with knowledge of Minhaj’s schedule, Minhaj’s meeting at the Saudi Embassy happened at least a month before Khashoggi’s murder, something an e-mail confirms. Minhaj said that he’d conflated the time lines as a storytelling device, to “make it feel the way it felt.”
Minhaj is the center of the story, either as victim (to elicit pity) or as hero (to elicit admiration). He's never just an observer. Generally comedians will tell stories that are somewhat self-deprecating, so the half-truths or exaggerations are easier to swallow because the comic is making themselves look like the asshole. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a great example of this. Larry David is making himself the butt of most of the jokes. None of the situations in that show actually literally happened, but they are probably "emotionally" true in that Larry David probably is that hyperfixated and neurotic and oblivious to other peoples' needs. But it's pretty clear any time David is exaggerating, he's exaggerating things about himself to make himself look like the asshole.
But it's fine because Larry David gets a choice in exactly how bad he wants to look. He gets to be in on the joke. When the exaggerations are in service of making other people look bad I think you gotta take some responsibility for that. They aren't getting to be in on the joke.
I remember enjoying his show Patriot Act right up until the point where he covered a topic I had some familiarity with. The episode was so slanted, so misleading, that I realized I'd probably been...
I remember enjoying his show Patriot Act right up until the point where he covered a topic I had some familiarity with. The episode was so slanted, so misleading, that I realized I'd probably been taken for a ride in the other episodes. It's just that I lacked enough knowledge to see it. It's difficult to keep a clear head when someone is telling lies that fit your preconceptions of the world.
Comedy is comedy, but given that it sounds like he's smearing real people, and spinning fictions about how his family is being threatened, the fabrications cross a line into ick.
He claims he has 'characters' for his specials but they're not Borat level characters, they're just him. The fact that he tells the same stories in interviews means he doesn't draw the line...
He claims he has 'characters' for his specials but they're not Borat level characters, they're just him. The fact that he tells the same stories in interviews means he doesn't draw the line between 'him' and him.
Some stories are easier to twist without the 'I know a guy' factor but you tell those to a few people at a bar with a "No shit, there I was" so they know you're bull shitting.
"In his standup specials, the former “Patriot Act” host often recounts harrowing experiences he’s faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?"
Yes. I was initially unsure about how I would answer this question, but a bit of quick thought makes me pretty confident that I do believe that using a lie to advance an agenda is not a good thing, whether it is an agenda I agree with or not. I've seen Minaj's specials, and enjoyed them, and took the opportunity to reflect on the morals of his stories. His stories certainly did seem to pack more of a punch when they were told with him as the protagonist, than they might have if he just relayed the story as happened to someone else.
However, I often feel disgusted by how right-wing pundits use lies and half-truths to advance their agenda, which I definitely do not agree with. So, I can't, in good conscience, condone using lies and half-truths to advance an agenda which I might happen to agree with.
If Minaj was upfront about his act being fables, rather than truthful stories, I'd have more respect for it. Transparency is an important part of being righteous, in my opinion.
Yes, I always assume most standup comedian stories are made up, and that's generally fine, but there's a big difference between making up some trivial thing that happened at a bar to set up a good joke, and making up a detailed story about a real person to advance a political point. The former is purely for entertainment and similar to stage magicians "lying" about a trick, and the latter is actually lying to thousands of people who would probably be upset to know you lied.
I think Minhaj clearly thinks of himself as a comedian first and that's why he sees this as ok, as he says “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise". That is usually true, and that's probably what all his comedian friends and influences have taught him, but what he's doing is more than just setting up a punchline. “I think they are coming for the emotional roller-coaster ride.” No they aren't, if that's what you want you watch a movie or a "reality" show that you basically know is fake. That is not how standup comedy is presented and generally thought of.
The mixing of definitive factual information like a news article about an FBI agent mixed with narrative based jokes is a problem, I think.
I understand that comedians tend toward hyperbole, and sometimes they also mix in real messages. I dont think Dave Chappelle actually met a weed selling baby on a street corner at 2 AM, but I don't think he was trying to make it seem like he really did, even if on the whole his comedy was making a genuine point about living as a black american in some of his jokes.
But throwing a real guy on screen and then tying him to a maybe fabricated story about yourself where he is the bad guy seems like very irresponsible behavior.
This part feels kinda inflammatory. So the head of research was the only person allowed in. The women researchers felt shunted to the side. So were the men researchers just cool with being shunted aside, or were all men allowed in and the women were excluded? Because it sounds like fact checkers in general were being pushed out, but its making it sound like a sexism thing.
I read this part and realized how much cope Minhaj is engaged in.
This is the problem Hasan! The reason we're fine with people making shit up for stand-up bits is because it's in service to a pointless joke. The fabrications are okay when there's no point to it. But when you're trying to make a point and support an argument about how the world actually looks it needs to be based on references to the world as it actually is. Building your point on a foundation of stuff you just made up is. . . well lying.
The other point is just the general focus on self-aggrandizement when he does fabricate stuff.
Minhaj is the center of the story, either as victim (to elicit pity) or as hero (to elicit admiration). He's never just an observer. Generally comedians will tell stories that are somewhat self-deprecating, so the half-truths or exaggerations are easier to swallow because the comic is making themselves look like the asshole. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a great example of this. Larry David is making himself the butt of most of the jokes. None of the situations in that show actually literally happened, but they are probably "emotionally" true in that Larry David probably is that hyperfixated and neurotic and oblivious to other peoples' needs. But it's pretty clear any time David is exaggerating, he's exaggerating things about himself to make himself look like the asshole.
But it's fine because Larry David gets a choice in exactly how bad he wants to look. He gets to be in on the joke. When the exaggerations are in service of making other people look bad I think you gotta take some responsibility for that. They aren't getting to be in on the joke.
I remember enjoying his show Patriot Act right up until the point where he covered a topic I had some familiarity with. The episode was so slanted, so misleading, that I realized I'd probably been taken for a ride in the other episodes. It's just that I lacked enough knowledge to see it. It's difficult to keep a clear head when someone is telling lies that fit your preconceptions of the world.
Comedy is comedy, but given that it sounds like he's smearing real people, and spinning fictions about how his family is being threatened, the fabrications cross a line into ick.
He claims he has 'characters' for his specials but they're not Borat level characters, they're just him. The fact that he tells the same stories in interviews means he doesn't draw the line between 'him' and him.
Some stories are easier to twist without the 'I know a guy' factor but you tell those to a few people at a bar with a "No shit, there I was" so they know you're bull shitting.