![]() If she spent weeks researching and could only come up with these four instances, why didn't she write an article piece entitled, "I tried to fact-shame a comedian and all I came up with was a few minor examples"? "After many weeks of trying," she writes, "I had been unable to confirm some of the stories that he had told onstage." She fails to tell why she felt compelled to fact-check Minhaj's stand-up routine in the first place. Why is this even news?īut Malone didn't want to write that story, for whatever reason. The big reveal in fact-checking Hasan Minhaj isn't that on at least four occasions he said something happened to him in a way it hadn't. The only shifts involve putting Minhaj in a more central position in the story, or exaggerating his experience of threat and humiliation. Why is this even news? Comedy nearly always includes exaggeration, embellishment and hyperbole.īeyond that, each of these "gotcha" stories is largely true. The big reveal in fact-checking Minhaj's stand-up isn't that on at least four occasions he said something happened to him in a way it hadn't. In his version, the rejection took place on the night of the prom in a highly humiliating fashion, when in fact it happened a few days earlier. 4) He told a story about being rejected by a white girl in high school whom he wanted to take to the prom. 3) He adjusted the timeline of a meeting at the Saudi embassy so it overlapped with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, when the two events were at least a month apart. He did get a threatening letter containing white powder, but it wasn't toxic and did not lead to his daughter going to the hospital. 2) Minhaj exaggerated a story about a threatening letter sent to his house. Monteilh was indeed an FBI informant within the Muslim community, but Minhaj never met him. Her article, which seems designed to suggest that Minhaj is not fit to become the next host of "The Daily Show," points to moments in Minhaj's stand-up routines where he appears to have stretched the truth for greater comedic impact.Īccording to Malone, Minhaj wasn't literally accurate four times: 1) He suggested he had personally encountered an FBI informant, Craig Monteilh, who had infiltrated Muslim communities to spy on them in Southern California. This story helps put in context New Yorker reporter Clare Malone's recent fact-checking mission with Hasan Minhaj. ![]() Is Hasan Minhaj still in the running to host "The Daily Show"? It would have missed the point of the joke, misunderstood the difference between literal and figurative communication and missed the power of comedy to make us think. And you know why nobody checked all that? Because doing that would have been stupid. No one fretted over whether the woman had really been 18, whether, in fact, she didn't have sex for years after that, whether Pryor's father had actually died during sex and whether, as Pryor suggests, the woman got pregnant. Yet guess what? No one, to my knowledge, ever tried to fact-check it. His father had died having sex: "That's called recycling." Then one day she apologized to Pryor for killing his dad, to which Pryor said there was no need to apologize. My father came and went at the same time." For years, according to Pryor, the woman couldn't get anyone to have sex with her. Comedy legend Richard Pryor had a regular bit where he talked about his father's death.
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