Spoilers: "Emotional Truths" means "bullshit"<p>I've seen a couple of his specials... I think when your show becomes less traditional jokes and more "man this CRAAAAAZY thing happened to me, for real!", well, it's important that the crazy thing actually happened. A lot of his stories rang sorta "too good to be true" so this article confirms my pre-existing opinion, I guess.<p>edit: good lord 'Minhaj also acknowledged to me that the threatening tweets displayed on the large screen during “The King’s Jester” were not authentic but, rather, heightened for comedic effect.'
My problem with Minhaj is the same problem I have with all newsinfotainment comedians. The mixing of news and entertainment on the left is no better than red meat bait on Fox News.<p>This stands for Stewart, Colbert, Klepper, Oliver, Noah, etc.<p>If you're whole shtick is about how (group X) is so bad and (here's a bunch of things that have happened to me), then you don't get to fallback on "hey I'm a comedian, this is just entertainment, of course its made up".<p>It's the same vibe as the people who love the orange man because even though he lies nonstop, he says things that appeal to how they feel.<p>Minhaj is not "just a comedian", he had a 40 episode news show - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_with_Hasan_Minhaj" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_with_Hasan_Minhaj</a> after being on the Daily Show .. all in the same timeframe he was doing these comedy tours. He's even been called to testify before congress after one of his episodes did a deep dive on student loans.<p>The untrue jokes that he told about racism were long, deeply specific and extremely dire things like being the target of an FBI sting, anthrax hoax attack, or being physically attacked for his race. A few simple jokes about some words said or getting turned down for a date would be a smaller matter.
I don't particularly care whether a particular comedians humor is backed up by fact because I don't have that expectation.<p>The problem is more like this: there are things that we as society knows to be "true" because we hear about them all the time. Since we know that to be true, it doesn't bother us if a specific example is made up because it resonates to what we think is true. The issue is that sometimes it seems like it you look, many of the examples are made up but we don't make the jump from that to "oh maybe this thing we hear about all the time isn't true."
Wow. I casually enjoyed Minhaj's show on Netflix and the other random places I've seen him pop up. I also thought he'd be a great candidate to take over Trevor Noah's seat on the Daily Show.<p>But I had no idea about these fabrications or "emotional truths" / lies. Whatever the intent, this is downright emotional manipulation and really paints him in a completely different light to me. I will not be watching anything else he's involved with and hope he disappears into obscurity.
It's sorta wack to claim all this happened to you. It's also wild that adults need to write opinion pieces to dissect that "jokes aren't real."