Hasan Minhaj got a 1310 on his SATs.
While this may seem like an arbitrary
introduction to the 34-year-old host of
Netflix’s Patriot Act, one designed to
make him cringe—it is—it’s also one of
the most salient points about him. First
of all, he brings it up all the time. He
brought it up when he was a correspon-
dent for The Daily Show. He brought it
up in his Peabody Award–winning stand-
up special, Homecoming King (“not good
for an Indian kid!”). He brought it up
on the inaugural episode of Patriot Act,
a show that received an unprecedented
32-episode order before it aired. He’s
in on the self-infantilizing nature of the
joke, of the ridiculousness of holding on
to suburban disappointments, but therein
lies the core of Hasan Minhaj. “When I
was developing Homecoming King, we had
some really heated conversations where
my cocreator was like, ‘Dude, come on,
your rst love didn’t want to go to prom
with you. Your spine isn’t getting shat-
tered in the back of a police car.’ But I
pushed back. Why does the collateral
damage always have to be death in order
for the story to be valid? Why does our
story have to be steeped in poverty porn
in order for it to matter?”
He continues on what’s clearly a famil-
iar path, widening his eyes, which are
already fairly puppy-dog, even when he’s
not being sarcastic.
“ ‘Oh, my name’s Hasan Minhaj, I
grew up in the gullies of Mumbai and
never thought I’d make it to America!’ ”
he mocks. “Like, we can’t get Lena Dun-
ham freedom? We can’t just say ‘Dat-
ing’s hard’? ”
We are standing in front of a 10-foot
inflatable red lota (“This is the O.G.
bidet,” Minhaj explains. “We’ve been
on butt hygiene for a minute”) that reads
“SHIT HAPPENS!” It’s the opening day of
artist Maria Qamar’s rst solo exhibition
on the Lower East Side. Qamar, a Paki-
stani Canadian artist (aka @hatecopy),
came to Minhaj’s attention via “brown
Twitter,” he says; Mindy Kaling has fea-
tured her work on sets as well as on a per-
sonal holiday card. Much of Qamar’s work
is inspired by Indian soap opera heroines,
and the e£ect is that of a subversive Lich-
tenstein. It’s easy to see why Minhaj feels
a kinship. While you’re busy appreciat-
ing how stylish it is, the political soul of it
comes straight for you. In one painting,
a woman slaps Trump across the face as
she shouts “Bidaai!” which means “Fix
yourself!” more or less.
“What I like most about her work is
that it puts brown female leads front and
center. She just goes for it,” says Minhaj.
“There’s a lot of brown dudes out there
right now—we’re taking up a lot of space.”
He has a point, albeit one that some-
what undermines his previous point. With
increased representation comes diverse
preoccupations. One thing you can say
about, say, Aziz Ansari (who opened his
latest special with a good-natured Minhaj
name-drop) is, that guy has made a career
out of “Dating’s hard.” But the expecta-
tions for Minhaj are di£erent. He started
as a stand-up, but broke out as a satirist on
Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, doing segments
on the Muslim ban and equal pay in wom-
en’s soccer. To seal the deal, he played the
notoriously tough ballroom of the White
House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2017,
months after Trump took o§ce. “Nobody
wanted it,” says Minhaj of the job. But
his friend, the comedian John Mulaney,
was moved by the reality of the thing—
Minhaj, the son of Muslim American
immigrants, “was going to make fun of
the biggest worst sonofabitch that ever
got to be president ever.”
Now, with Patriot Act in its fourth sea-
son, Minhaj does “woke TED talks,” or
what he describes to me as “more story-
telling in the same vein as Colin Quinn
or Mike Birbiglia.” This means the com-
edy about his personal life—he and his
wife and college sweetheart, Beena Patel,
recently welcomed a baby girl—has faded
to the background. Not that it was ever
particularly pronounced. “I respect the
privacy of the people who I love,” he
says, “and they didn’t sign up for this.”And he means it. Lots of celebrities won’t
post pictures of their kids’ faces on social
media, but Minhaj asks that his daugh-
ter’s name be o£ the record. Instead, he
chooses to talk about his youth. Thus,
by rooting personal details in the past,
Minhaj can trick an audience into think-
ing he’s sharing more of his current self
than he actually is.M
inhaj grew up in Davis, Cali-
fornia, near Sacramento: “the
punching bag of the state—
everyone thinks everything north of the
Bay Area is just elds and sadness.” This
is also the artistic terrain of Joan Didion
and Greta Gerwig, so—white. Minhaj’s
father immigrated in 1982. He was born
here and raised by his father for eight
years while his mother completed her
medical degree in India. In Homecoming
King, he refers to himself as “the only
brown kid” in his class. He was brought
up in a conservative Muslim home; unlike
with other comedians, you can sense the
eternal good kid in him, the one who will
still drop his wife’s hand in public if he
passes an “auntie or uncle, like, we are
married!” He also grew up with «eeting
exposure to television, which meant even
less exposure to comedy. So no early
idols—no Simpsons, no nothing.
“They didn’t get to me early enough,”
says Minhaj. “I remember in college every-
one being like, ‘Oh, my God, Dave Letter-
man is my god,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s nice.’ ”
UCLA (premed) was the dream, but
then he ran into someone he knew who
warned him of the rigor of the classes, so
he decided to go to U.C. Davis, where he’d
likely get a better GPA. “I got scared,” he
says. “Then I lied to all my friends and
said I went to Davis because I got a schol-
arship. I know people laugh at this now,
but it’s what it represents for me.”
This is a man who, after devoting a
Patriot Act episode to Mohammed bin
Salman and the Saudi royal family, had
to contend with death threats and hang-
up calls. (“If this person is calling my cell
phone, it means they know my area code,
it means they know where I live.”) Can
we really be dwelling on the wounds of
college admissions past? I was wait-
listed and rejected from my rst-choice
school, but you don’t see me bringing it
up 22 years later in a celebrity prole.
“I self-sabotaged and I was like, I’m
never letting this happen again. So by144 NOVEMBER 2019