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    Was a Scandal the Best Thing to Happen to Hasan Minhaj?

    At the Beacon, the comic took a different tack after posting a video rebutting a New Yorker article on fabrications in his work. The crowd went wild.Finishing a story about a girl cheating on him in 11th grade, Hasan Minhaj turned to the audience at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan during the first of two shows on Friday night and said, “Don’t fact-check me.”The crowd came alive at this nod to the recent New Yorker article by Clare Malone exposing several of his onstage stories as fabrications. “I had to go head-to-head with one of the most dangerous organizations in the world,” he said, adding that he didn’t mean the U.S. military or the Israeli Defense Forces. “I am talking about a white woman with a keyboard.”Then he mocked the article as “water is wet” obvious before describing it as a sign of success. “I’ve made it: I got a real old scandal,” he said, adding, “A dorky scandal.” With regret in his voice, Minhaj said he didn’t molest a child or sleep with a porn star: “I got caught embellishing for dramatic effect.”Typical crisis management dictates you should move on, not fixate. But in our attention economy, where the most popular Netflix specials of the past year featured Chris Rock talking about the Slap and John Mulaney joking about going to rehab, comedians are wise to consider Rahm Emanuel’s famous political advice: Never let a good crisis go to waste. Minhaj split the difference. He did not linger on the story but dedicated a solid chunk of jokes to it that got one of the biggest responses of the night. There were moments when I even thought this scandal might be the best thing that ever happened to him.For such a polished, assured comedian, getting your image scuffed up a bit can add a little more tension to your comedy. David Sedaris faced a similar media firestorm and very few even remember it. In his new act, Minhaj mocked how politicians treat him as a spokesman for his people. (“They think I’m the brown whisperer,” he said.) The more nuanced critiques of his deceptions focused on the context of his work, firmly in “The Daily Show” tradition of blurring lines between silly comedy and grave journalism. The New Yorker article took some of that weight off him, shifting expectations.It’s notable that he released a 21-minute video defending himself and criticizing the New Yorker piece as misleading. (For a smart analysis that gets into the weeds on the issues, read Nadira Goffe from Slate.) Instead of downplaying the dust-up as he did onstage, he argued in the video that the New Yorker writer made him sound like “a psycho,” and he even expressed a few notes of contrition, promising to be “more thoughtful” about blending fiction and nonfiction. In a way, he did this at the Beacon, drawing attention to his lies, teaching his audience how to read him.Reactions to this article varied wildly. My least favorite was the popular genre of commenters who emerge after every scandal to pile on by saying, “I never liked their work anyway.” It manages the feat of trivializing moral and artistic issues.Yet the Minhaj controversy quietly opened a useful, long overdue discussion about truth in comedy that leverages nonfiction. More art than ever leans on the trust and authenticity of journalism, so it’s good for performers to think about the peculiar bargain they have struck with their audience and how to navigate it. There is an endless number of funny ways to tip off a crowd to your level of honesty.While I thought some of Minhaj’s fabrications were unnecessary and wrongheaded, I never thought he was a “psycho.” What I saw was a comic responding to the incentives of a culture that not only prefers its politics wrapped inside a personal emotional story, but also gives clout to dramatic displays of victimhood.We live in a time when seemingly everyone, no matter how rich, famous or successful, is angling to play the victim. Elon Musk invites sympathy by telling us that a company refusing to advertise on his site is equivalent to blackmail. When even Taylor Swift says she was canceled in the Time magazine article announcing her as Person of the Year, you know that the ability to repackage yourself as the underdog is limitless.As it happens, this provides an opening for jokes. In Leo Reich’s cleverly self-aware new special, “Literally Who Cares?” (Max), the young comic spoofs this tendency. He begins by saying his show is sponsored by his dad, who runs an incredible small business you might have heard of named Deutsche Bank. By the end, he insists he’s oppressed. “I read something recently that even if you haven’t been oppressed, you can feel like you have and it triggers the same endorphins.”The comic artist currently tackling this theme best is the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, whose feature “Sick of Myself” introduced audiences to a character who intentionally takes pills to make herself physically ill, to gain attention and fame. Borgli’s new movie, “Dream Scenario,” is about a beta male professor played by Nicolas Cage accused by a colleague of “searching for the insult.” In an outlandish twist, he starts showing up in people’s dreams doing violent things, and fragile students freak out in a parody of delicate sensitivities. The professor sees himself as the real victim and is then tempted by the embrace of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and, of course, the French. In other words, this movie is riffing on the most popular victim narrative of our moment: Cancel culture.Thankfully, Minhaj doesn’t go there, but he gets close. At one point in his show, he said the real divide in the country was not between rich and poor, Democratic or Republican, but between “the insane” and “the insufferable.”The insane include the people who stormed the capitol. He calls them nuts, before adding: “but fun.” Then he grew more animated describing the insufferable by their “NPR tote-bag energy” and “hall monitor” tendencies. It was a head fake to The New Yorker article before a pivot to self-deprecation, poking fun at the time he corrected Ellen DeGeneres on her show for mispronouncing his name.“What was I expecting?” he asked. “She’s a billionaire who’s best friends with Oprah. She’s not a Sufi poet.”Minhaj is telling us that he was a member of the insufferable. A reformed one, perhaps? It repositions him less as a righteous political comic than a more self-questioning, personal comic, a move he had already begun to make; this scandal may have accelerated the shift.His show concluded with a long bit about therapy and family, in which, deploying one of his characteristic dramatic pauses, followed by whispery voice close to the microphone, he confessed his real kink: Acceptance. More

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    Lying in Comedy Isn’t Always Wrong, but Hasan Minhaj Crossed a Line

    The stand-up’s penchant for making up stories goes beyond embellishment. When real people and real stakes are involved, a different standard applies.When I first heard that The New Yorker had published an exposé on the veracity of the stand-up comedy of Hasan Minhaj, I rolled my eyes.We’re fact-checking jokes now? Come on. Comedy is an art, not an op-ed. And honesty has always struck me as the most overrated virtue in comedy. But Clare Malone’s reporting in the piece is scrupulous and fair, if a little prosecutorial in its focus. It presents more questions than answers and should inspire some rethinking of the muddy relationship between comedy and truth.Digging into his last two specials, Malone reveals Hasan Minhaj as a comic who leans on fictions to make real-world arguments, putting himself closer to the center of news stories to make him seem more brave or wronged or in danger. To take one example, Minhaj says in “The King’s Jester” (2022) that after the government passed the Patriot Act in the wake of Sept. 11, an undercover F.B.I. informant named Brother Eric had infiltrated his childhood mosque and had dinner at his house. Minhaj recalls how he sniffed him out and, in a prank, asked about getting a pilot’s license, which led to a police officer throwing him against a car.The New Yorker found that there was such a man working in counterterrorism but that Minhaj never met him. Minhaj defended his fabrications as fibs in service to “emotional truth.” For someone in the running to be the next host of “The Daily Show,” that term sounds a little too much like Kellyanne Conway’s euphemism “alternative facts.”Amid plenty of critics online, Whoopi Goldberg was one of the few major figures who spoke up for Minhaj, saying on “The View” that embellishing in the name of a larger truth is what comics do. But here is where some more context would be helpful.Stand-up comedy was never expected to be factually accurate. Rodney Dangerfield, to be clear, got respect. In the setups for early jokes, Richard Pryor lied about having a Puerto Rican mother and living in a Jewish tenement. An old-school observational comic like Jerry Seinfeld has said all his comedy is made up, even his opinions.But in the past few decades, with the rise of “The Daily Show,” which has blurred lines between comedy and the news, as well as the proliferation of confessional solo shows that depend on dramatic revelations that dovetail nicely with jokes, the form has evolved and so have audiences’ assumptions. And they vary wildly depending on the artist.In Sebastian Maniscalco’s last special, “Is It Me?,” he told a story poking fun at a kid in his child’s class who identifies as a lion. Asked by The Daily Beast, he said that this wasn’t true, but that he used it because it puts “a mirror on society” — another kind of emotional truth. Minhaj’s inventions were part of the same tradition, one that deserves new scrutiny.Minhaj in “The King’s Jester.” Comics from Richard Pryor to Jerry Seinfeld to Sebastian Maniscalco have all invented details for their acts.Clifton Prescod/NetflixIt’s also important to point out that many current comics think seriously about their fictions, setting their own code. “I am quite strict about telling the truth,” Daniel Kitson once told me. “I am interested in engaging emotionally and I don’t want to be duplicitous.”In an interview with Taylor Tomlinson this year, she told me she cut a joke about being single after she started dating someone because even that minor white lie made her uncomfortable. Many other comics, like Kate Berlant, build unreliability into their acts. Others lie so overtly that it sets expectations. What’s tricky is that there is no one industry standard.The reality is that some comics have more leeway toying with the truth than others. All artists teach their audience how to view them, by the way they tell jokes, their style, the level of absurdity. What makes Hasan Minhaj such a troubling example is that his style, onstage and often off in interviews, suggested we should believe him.Minhaj is known for using visual aids the way a journalist would. He mixes clips of television news and photos from his life with a general tone of sincerity. The nature of his deceptions were peculiar. He didn’t invent stuff to make himself funnier. He did it to raise the stakes in the easiest, most self-regarding way possible. Lying in comedy isn’t necessarily wrong. But how you lie matters. Minhaj has told a story about his prom date reneging on the day of the dance because her parents didn’t want her seen in photos with a “brown boy.” He now admits to some untruths in this story, but not all, and left her perspective out. (The woman has said she and her family faced online threats for years.) This genre of fiction is a shortcut to sympathy, an unearned tug at the heartstrings. It’s not a capital crime, but it’s an unnecessary and risky one.Lies involving real people should add a new sense of obligation. The problem with only considering the standard of emotional truth is that it can blind you to the impact on the actual world outside your emotions. You could say that the emotional truth behind the Patriot Act was that the terrorism of Sept. 11 required extreme tactics to feel safe, but that doesn’t make the legislation right. The truth is usually more complex than the way you feel about it.Watching “The King’s Jester” now hits differently. In some ways, it’s more interesting than the first time I saw it, when it seemed mawkish. Some jokes, like his desperation for social media clout, seem like clues. And others come across as the work of a guilty conscience, like the moment when Minhaj faces the audience and says: “Everything here is built on trust.”This is the truth. Every comic has an unspoken pact with the audience. The one Seinfeld has is different from Minhaj’s, and part of the reason has nothing to do with their intentions. Whether or not critics like me think authenticity is important, it does matter to the audience. So does honesty. And comics understand that. It’s no accident that many of the political comedians working today, especially on television, employ researchers from traditional news sources. Getting facts right matters, especially when the comedy is about grave social issues.That’s not just because a comic’s credibility can take a hit. When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.Minhaj subbing in as a host on “The Daily Show.” Every comic has an unspoken pact with the audience.Matt Wilson/Comedy Central’s The Daily ShowWhen the storyteller Mike Daisey, making an argument about factory conditions in China, said he visited a sweatshop even though he hadn’t, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party used the resulting scandal to try to discredit all reporting by Western media. This kind of argument has only become more common. Look at Russell Brand’s defense against accusations of rape and grooming: He tried to discredit his accusers by saying you can’t trust the mainstream media.One of the most notable aspects of the Minhaj story is the lack of nuance in his response, the complete confidence he projects. It’s striking that he seemingly has no concerns about possibly deceiving some of his audience. His special is about his wife challenging him to take responsibility for how his words can negatively affect his family. One wonders if there will be any more introspection.In the summer, Minhaj interviewed President Barack Obama and began by bringing up his annual best-of lists, skeptically asking if he really consumes all of those books, albums and movies. When Obama said he did, Minhaj pushed back: “No, you didn’t.”Later on his podcast “Working It Out,” Mike Birbiglia asked Minhaj how he could be so bold with the ex-president. Minhaj said his question for Obama was “innocuous.” That seems like naïveté masquerading as savvy.If Obama admitted to lying about even something that inconsequential, it would be a global story. We live in a world where people have long peddled conspiracies about him and would jump on any deception as evidence of some broader scandal. There’s a temptation to respond to the onslaught of lies by thinking that the only way to fight back is to lie some more. But that has it wrong. To quote Minhaj, everything is built on trust.That trust operates differently for politicians and journalists than for artists, but it matters for us all. Treat it carelessly and the price can be steep. More

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    New Yorker Festival, which runs Will Host Bono and Rep Jamie Raskin

    The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

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    Why Write About Pop Music? ‘I Like When People Disagree About Stuff.’

    Kelefa Sanneh hopes to start some arguments with his new book, “Major Labels,” which chronicles the past 50 years of rock, hip-hop, country and other musical genres.Seventeen years ago, Kelefa Sanneh was doing what he likes best: poking at conventional wisdom.As a pop music critic for this newspaper, he wrote a piece against “rockism,” the longstanding critical bias that favored guitar-driven popular music written by its performers (Bruce Springsteen, U2) as more authentic and worthy than songs by production-heavy pop idols (Christina Aguilera, Usher). Sanneh argued for the possibility of “a fluid musical world where it’s impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures.”Rockism was an insider’s concept at the time, bandied about among critics, but it became a household word, along with its antagonist, poptimism, a belief in not only expunging the guilt from those pleasures but investing deep thought in them.Sanneh had been trying to muddle things, but soon afterward, they got very simple again. Poptimism won. In a rout.“At the time, it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Sanneh is hoping to kick-start a few new disputes and revisit some older ones in his first book, “Major Labels,” a history of the past 50 years of popular music told through the stories of seven genres: rock ’n’ roll, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music and pop. It is due out from Penguin Press on Tuesday.Kelefa Sanneh’s book “Major Labels” is out on Oct. 5.Since 2008, Sanneh has been on staff at The New Yorker, where he’s written about politics, boxing, comedy and sociology in addition to music. After years away from the critic’s beat, “the idea of diving back into music started to seem exciting,” he said. “And I realized I was still obsessed with it.”Browsing through Metropolis Vintage, a T-shirt shop just south of Manhattan’s Union Square, Sanneh approvingly noted the democratic mix of concert mementos. “One of the things I like about popular music is how it frustrates pretension,” he said, skimming through the hangers. “You have all these arguments, but they all end up on T-shirts next to each other on the rack. The arguments fade and someone is like: ‘Should I grab a Madonna shirt or maybe Bob Seger?’”Sanneh, tall and reedy at 45, was wearing a baseball hat with the phrase “Woo Ah!” across the front in pink — a keepsake from a concert by the German star Kim Petras, a current pillar of poptimism.Sanneh writes early in the book that “Major Labels” is “a defense of musical genres.” It’s popular now to praise people who can “slip between” genres or “transcend” them, he said. But to his ear, genres are not only inevitable but valuable.“Every community is defined by inclusion and exclusion,” he said. “And every musical community is in part a critique — implicit and often explicit — of other forms of music, other communities. You don’t get that tight-knit sense of being part of something without at least a little bit of pigheadedness.”His book ponders the historical divisions between R&B and hip-hop, the disco wars and the ensuing paths of dance music, the ways in which country music has hewed closer to the mainstream without losing its defining characteristics. He wanted to retrace how genres developed and solidified (and where they might remain ductile), and to recount the types of debates that he says don’t arise much anymore, like “whether Prince is a sellout, or whether Grand Funk Railroad is the future of rock n’ roll.”Sanneh describes a typical Gen X childhood of being introduced to popular music — Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Bob Marley — by peers, sometimes taped off the radio. (Sanneh said he’s a full-time streamer these days and no longer buys physical copies of music.) But it wasn’t until he discovered punk as a young teenager — the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols — that he felt a passion for it.“It really was linked to the idea of having opinions,” he says of the time when his fandom intensified. He had previously thought, “Here are the Beatles, everyone likes the Beatles and you’re listening to the Beatles. I didn’t realize you could say: ‘No, I’m turning this stuff off, and this stuff on; that’s bad, that’s good.’ That was almost more seductive to me than the music; the idea that you could make up your own mind about it.”Sanneh at Academy Records in New York’s East Village. In the 2000s, “it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesAs a student at Harvard, Sanneh worked in the punk department of the radio station WHRB, a position that required he pass a written examination. He still considers himself a punk at heart, a jarring claim for someone with his temperament and who writes about his mother chaperoning him at a Ramones concert when he was 14.It’s easy to imagine that he inherited his kindly but questioning spirit from his parents. His father, Lamin Sanneh, was born and raised in poverty in Gambia. Raised Muslim, as a teenager he converted to Christianity, which he discovered through his own studying. He went on to become a leading scholar of world religion who taught at Yale for 30 years.His son can remember him discussing various subjects at the family dinner table and becoming “impatient with pat explanations.” He was equally annoyed by simplistic Christian political positions and by knee-jerk dismissals of Christianity; and, after 9/11, by broad-stroke arguments that either lumped Islam together with Christianity or posited the faiths as polar-opposite rivals. Kelefa Sanneh’s mother, Sandra Sanneh, followed her own remarkable trajectory. White and raised in South Africa, she became a scholar of Zulu and other African languages, retiring from Yale in 2020 after her own three decades there.Kelefa Sanneh was born in Birmingham, England, and soon after moved to Accra, Ghana, where his father was teaching. Two years later, another job took the family to Aberdeen, Scotland, and when Sanneh was 5, the family moved to Massachusetts. He’s always been most comfortable and confident writing in a mode that’s “a bit more analytical, a little less hot-blooded,” he said, and tries to explain subjects as if coming to them from another world.“I always thought about it as related to being an immigrant,” he said.Growing up, Sanneh also recalls “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out: ‘What are they doing over there?’ And that immigrant’s sense of whenever someone says, ‘No, this is country music, they’re singing about the troops, this is not for you,’ saying, ‘Hold on a second, I’ll be the judge of that.’ So I’ve always thought of it as curiosity and maybe a bit of mischief.”“His basic stance is amused skepticism,” said Ben Ratliff, another former music critic for The Times who worked with Sanneh. “He can put on an extraordinarily dispassionate performance, in the best critical sense of that word.”Sanneh, who moved to the U.S. when he was 5, can remember, he said, “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesSanneh comes across as more of a complicator than a contrarian, not reflexively antagonistic but suspicious of unanimity. “Fundamentally I like when people disagree about stuff,” he said. “Anytime there’s a situation in which people claim there can be no disagreement, I always get interested.” He has brought that interest to bear in nuanced pieces about affirmative action and antiracism, among other subjects.Henry Finder, the editorial director of The New Yorker, has known Sanneh for more than 20 years, and read drafts of “Major Labels” for him. Finder also met Sanneh’s father on several occasions before his death in 2019 and finds similarities in how father and son approach their fields.Lamin Sanneh, Finder said, “devoted a lot of energy to ecumenism; he wanted a world in which people can live together in a community without everyone being the same. In a cultural zone, K’s instincts are similar.” (Those who know Kelefa Sanneh call him K.)In the realm of music, Sanneh says, many listeners grow harder to please as they get older. He’s had the opposite experience, his interrogation of different genres opening him up to their various pleasures.“I got less judgmental over the years, which is probably a good thing for a music listener but maybe not such a good thing for a music critic,” he says. “I found it surprisingly more and more difficult to find stuff that I really, really hated.” More