4 ms·

Hasan Minhaj’s “Emotional Truths”

53 points by wallflower 3y ago

civilitty 3y ago
https://archive.ph/35BV3 https://archive.ph/35BV3
floren 3y ago
Spoilers: "Emotional Truths" means "bullshit" 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. 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.'
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  Good comedians will often explicitly acknowledge that they’re making things up: “My girlfriend, who only exists for this joke, was calling me the other day…” When done well, this does not undercut the joke. In contrast, if Minhaj was upfront about his fabrications he would not elicit the same moral outrage that undergirds his popularity.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    "... who only exists for this joke..." is funny in and of itself. It doesn't undercut the joke, it adds another laugh line. (Not really a punch line, but a funny line that will draw a laugh.)
- gretch 3y ago
  Yeah these stories kinda read like socially engineered tales to confirm pre-conceived bias. When the alt-right tells these kinds of stories, it's usually like "Today I was persecuted for being a white christian ..." Same energy at least.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
    "And then the whole bus clapped" tailored for your particular political tribe.
  - boppo1 3y ago
    The unfortunate thing is I'm seeing a non-negligible amount of white people move further toward white-nationalistic ideas because of stuff like Minhaj's emotional truths. Lots of white kids I grew up with in the 90s, who were not racist then, are expressing frustration with the following phenomenon: 1. A PoC says white people are overwhelmingly & consciously/unconsciously racist & white supremacist. 2. White person listening or targeted has never identified with racism, was raised to believe strongly in content of character, etc. 3. PoC makes claim of racism that white person directly observed or later discovered was falsified or exaggerated 4. White person has intense reaction and begins to engage with racial distrust & legitimately racist generalizations. There are much worse things happening & it's not a crisis like those that many PoC face regularly. But nonetheless, I've seen a process like I've described take place even with individuals who strongly identify(ied) as progressive. I have no suggested solutions. It's just something I'm observing which was previously limited to extremely rare edge cases that I'm now noticing with some regularity.
labrador 3y ago
Mark Twain told stories that never happened to him and said "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"
- LordShredda 3y ago
  But he never claimed that they were personal experiences on television
  - rmilejczz 3y ago
    He quite literally blended the line between fact and fiction, I’m not sure what you’re trying to highlight with this tbh. Mark Twain framed plenty of stories as being true experiences, which almost certainly did not happen. Television, obviously, did not exist yet.
- mysecretaccount 3y ago
  Honest, non-rhetorical question: is there an example where Mark Twain told a story that his audience presumed to be true and was invented to garner sympathy?
  - labrador 3y ago
    In Roughing It he writes about some sad Native-Americans that felt invented to me. It felt invented because he describes them as helpless and incapable. I doubt that was the general case, but he was making a point. GPT-4 Can you tell what chapter Mark Twains "Roughing It" where he describes some sad Native-Americans? The chapter you're referring to is Chapter 26. In this chapter, Twain describes an encounter with a group of Native Americans near the Humboldt River. He paints a rather bleak picture of their condition, noting their ragged appearance, their desolate surroundings, and the overall sense of hopelessness. Twain's description is both sympathetic and critical, as he comments on the impact of Western expansion on Native American communities.
    - mysecretaccount 3y ago
blovescoffee 3y ago
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."
- rmilejczz 3y ago
  Are they jokes or are they claims? This discourse is deeply confused
- slothtrop 3y ago
  That would be great, if what is under scrutiny was actually jokes.
  - blovescoffee 3y ago
    The word "comedy" appears 16 times in this article. Is it not clear to any serious person that this is comedy?
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I think it's wack to bounce back and forth between "doing news" and "doing comedy". It blurs the lines and honestly as terrifying as it sounds, some politically active, white collar, college educated, liberal people I know genuinely consume the majority of their news through these types of shows. The Daily Show, Patriot Act, Last Week Tonight, etc. I constantly get told by these people, who openly admit to not reading local news and are blissfully unaware of things in their own neighborhood, that I should watch X episode of Y news comedy hour so that I can "understand" issue Z. Sorry, but I'm literate and capable of reading, I don't need my news fed to me on a spoon while a comedian makes airplane noises. Chappelle never did a news show, and Peter Jennings never had a stand up tour. I prefer it that way. Seinfeld was funny, and his jokes never came across as being necessarily purely true.. but his whole shtick wasn't about being constantly persecuted for being a Jew or that say, Hispanics are mean to him. Chappelle told outlandish stories, but even his stuff was never like "let me tell you a particular story about the FBI trying to entrap my family / being the subject of a terror incident / etc". His stories were always more low stakes.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
At least he didn't go full Jussie Smollett, maybe that's the silver lining.
- rmilejczz 3y ago
  There’s a pretty massive difference between fraudulently staging a crime and telling jokes
okdood64 3y ago
Breaking: Comedians make shit up. In other news, water is wet.
- x86x87 3y ago
  Checking in to let you know that someone is going to point out that water is not wet any minute now.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > Breaking: Comedians make shit up. Yes, but if you’re personally claiming to be a victim of another race then you ought to be broadly telling the truth. Making jokes about terrible things you experienced doesn’t make any new victims but lying about what other races have done does make victims. Otherwise, you’re handing material to actual racists who can now factually call you a liar and by association call into question other true reports.
  - okdood64 3y ago
    Good point.
xyzelement 3y ago
I don't particularly care whether a particular comedians humor is backed up by fact because I don't have that expectation. 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."
system16 3y ago
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. 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.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Right this is my point - some people consume news media this way and then conflate fact&ficton. Even others in media were a bit surprised at the fabrications - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/cancel-culture-haruki-murakami-hasan-minhaj-jann-wenner.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/cancel-culture-haruk... "If I were in the audience of Minhaj’s show, I would have assumed he was telling the actual truth, not an emotional one." So I think simply glossing over this as "he's just a comedian, get a life guys" is being far too generous to the discernment of the average viewer, and giving Minhaj & others like him far too much leeway.
38 3y ago
uBlock Origin filter: newyorker.com##[class*="PaywallBarWrapper"] Stylus: @-moz-document domain("newyorker.com") { [class*="PersistentTopWrapper"] { position: static } }
steveBK123 3y ago
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. This stands for Stewart, Colbert, Klepper, Oliver, Noah, etc. 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". 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. Minhaj is not "just a comedian", he had a 40 episode news show - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_with_Hasan_Minhaj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_with_Hasan_Minhaj 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. 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.
amriksohata 3y ago
Classic Hassan Minaj makes a big deal of everything he heard might have happened
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

53 points by wallflower 3y ago

https://archive.ph/35BV3 https://archive.ph/35BV3

Spoilers: "Emotional Truths" means "bullshit" 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. 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.'

kevinventullo 3y ago
Good comedians will often explicitly acknowledge that they’re making things up: “My girlfriend, who only exists for this joke, was calling me the other day…” When done well, this does not undercut the joke. In contrast, if Minhaj was upfront about his fabrications he would not elicit the same moral outrage that undergirds his popularity.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  "... who only exists for this joke..." is funny in and of itself. It doesn't undercut the joke, it adds another laugh line. (Not really a punch line, but a funny line that will draw a laugh.)
gretch 3y ago
Yeah these stories kinda read like socially engineered tales to confirm pre-conceived bias. When the alt-right tells these kinds of stories, it's usually like "Today I was persecuted for being a white christian ..." Same energy at least.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  "And then the whole bus clapped" tailored for your particular political tribe.
- boppo1 3y ago
  The unfortunate thing is I'm seeing a non-negligible amount of white people move further toward white-nationalistic ideas because of stuff like Minhaj's emotional truths. Lots of white kids I grew up with in the 90s, who were not racist then, are expressing frustration with the following phenomenon: 1. A PoC says white people are overwhelmingly & consciously/unconsciously racist & white supremacist. 2. White person listening or targeted has never identified with racism, was raised to believe strongly in content of character, etc. 3. PoC makes claim of racism that white person directly observed or later discovered was falsified or exaggerated 4. White person has intense reaction and begins to engage with racial distrust & legitimately racist generalizations. There are much worse things happening & it's not a crisis like those that many PoC face regularly. But nonetheless, I've seen a process like I've described take place even with individuals who strongly identify(ied) as progressive. I have no suggested solutions. It's just something I'm observing which was previously limited to extremely rare edge cases that I'm now noticing with some regularity.

labrador 3y ago

Mark Twain told stories that never happened to him and said "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"

LordShredda 3y ago
But he never claimed that they were personal experiences on television
- rmilejczz 3y ago
  He quite literally blended the line between fact and fiction, I’m not sure what you’re trying to highlight with this tbh. Mark Twain framed plenty of stories as being true experiences, which almost certainly did not happen. Television, obviously, did not exist yet.
mysecretaccount 3y ago
Honest, non-rhetorical question: is there an example where Mark Twain told a story that his audience presumed to be true and was invented to garner sympathy?
- labrador 3y ago
  In Roughing It he writes about some sad Native-Americans that felt invented to me. It felt invented because he describes them as helpless and incapable. I doubt that was the general case, but he was making a point. GPT-4 Can you tell what chapter Mark Twains "Roughing It" where he describes some sad Native-Americans? The chapter you're referring to is Chapter 26. In this chapter, Twain describes an encounter with a group of Native Americans near the Humboldt River. He paints a rather bleak picture of their condition, noting their ragged appearance, their desolate surroundings, and the overall sense of hopelessness. Twain's description is both sympathetic and critical, as he comments on the impact of Western expansion on Native American communities.
  - mysecretaccount 3y ago

blovescoffee 3y ago

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."

rmilejczz 3y ago
Are they jokes or are they claims? This discourse is deeply confused
slothtrop 3y ago
That would be great, if what is under scrutiny was actually jokes.
- blovescoffee 3y ago
  The word "comedy" appears 16 times in this article. Is it not clear to any serious person that this is comedy?
steveBK123 3y ago
I think it's wack to bounce back and forth between "doing news" and "doing comedy". It blurs the lines and honestly as terrifying as it sounds, some politically active, white collar, college educated, liberal people I know genuinely consume the majority of their news through these types of shows. The Daily Show, Patriot Act, Last Week Tonight, etc. I constantly get told by these people, who openly admit to not reading local news and are blissfully unaware of things in their own neighborhood, that I should watch X episode of Y news comedy hour so that I can "understand" issue Z. Sorry, but I'm literate and capable of reading, I don't need my news fed to me on a spoon while a comedian makes airplane noises. Chappelle never did a news show, and Peter Jennings never had a stand up tour. I prefer it that way. Seinfeld was funny, and his jokes never came across as being necessarily purely true.. but his whole shtick wasn't about being constantly persecuted for being a Jew or that say, Hispanics are mean to him. Chappelle told outlandish stories, but even his stuff was never like "let me tell you a particular story about the FBI trying to entrap my family / being the subject of a terror incident / etc". His stories were always more low stakes.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago

At least he didn't go full Jussie Smollett, maybe that's the silver lining.

rmilejczz 3y ago
There’s a pretty massive difference between fraudulently staging a crime and telling jokes

okdood64 3y ago

Breaking: Comedians make shit up. In other news, water is wet.

x86x87 3y ago
Checking in to let you know that someone is going to point out that water is not wet any minute now.
nyokodo 3y ago
> Breaking: Comedians make shit up. Yes, but if you’re personally claiming to be a victim of another race then you ought to be broadly telling the truth. Making jokes about terrible things you experienced doesn’t make any new victims but lying about what other races have done does make victims. Otherwise, you’re handing material to actual racists who can now factually call you a liar and by association call into question other true reports.
- okdood64 3y ago
  Good point.

xyzelement 3y ago

I don't particularly care whether a particular comedians humor is backed up by fact because I don't have that expectation. 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."

system16 3y ago

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. 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.

steveBK123 3y ago
Right this is my point - some people consume news media this way and then conflate fact&ficton. Even others in media were a bit surprised at the fabrications - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/cancel-culture-haruki-murakami-hasan-minhaj-jann-wenner.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/cancel-culture-haruk... "If I were in the audience of Minhaj’s show, I would have assumed he was telling the actual truth, not an emotional one." So I think simply glossing over this as "he's just a comedian, get a life guys" is being far too generous to the discernment of the average viewer, and giving Minhaj & others like him far too much leeway.

38 3y ago

uBlock Origin filter: newyorker.com##[class*="PaywallBarWrapper"] Stylus: @-moz-document domain("newyorker.com") { [class*="PersistentTopWrapper"] { position: static } }

steveBK123 3y ago

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. This stands for Stewart, Colbert, Klepper, Oliver, Noah, etc. 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". 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. Minhaj is not "just a comedian", he had a 40 episode news show - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_with_Hasan_Minhaj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_with_Hasan_Minhaj 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. 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.

amriksohata 3y ago

Classic Hassan Minaj makes a big deal of everything he heard might have happened

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]