the time I started driving to open mics
in San Francisco”—his peers included
Ali Wong, Maria Bamford, and Moshe
Kasher—“I told myself I just had to go
for it. I really think it’s informed the deci-
sions I make now.”
While most of us just guess at what
made us the way we are, Minhaj is hyper-
aware of what motivates him. There’s a
precision to his personality, an intellectual
calm that comes through when the camer-
as turn on. It’s beyond what happens when
a performer delivers a piece of rehearsed
writing. The effect is not just that of a
stand-up comedian (the NSA, amirite?)
playing to the energy of a crowd, but a
storyteller playing directly to an indi-
vidual. Even when the cameras are o
,
Minhaj speaks in whole paragraphs, par-
ticularly when it comes to his community.
“Yes, hate crimes happened to our
house on 9/11, but the other 364 days, we
live as this new group in America. The
race discussion in this country, the cogni-
tive framework, has always been a black-
white conversation, but post-1970s you
have an inux of immigrants from South
Asia, Iran, the Middle East, Latin Ameri-
ca, a group of children coming of age who
are able to put their spin on what America
is. But at the same time, in India, there’s
still this even wider generational divide.”
He asks if I’m familiar with Section
377, a law in the Indian Penal Code that
criminalized homosexuality until it was
ruled unconstitutional last year, though
it was a relic from British colonial rule.
“They took everything from us, and
we decided to keep their homophobia?
It’s also why Indians are loving Brexit.
The way they divided us all up? We’re
like, Oh, yeah, you should totally sepa-
rate from the EU.”
He is aware that there is an Indian
woman in Boris Johnson’s cabinet—“I
know! Sleeper cell. It’s so much easier to
take down the British Empire from with-
in.” Then he smiles and turns to inspect
some of Qamar’s silk-screened T-shirts,
satis¡ed he’s nailed the point.A
t irst, the comparisons to
fellow Daily Show alum John
Oliver were obvious, if super¡-
cial. (It’s like Last Week Tonight but brown!
And standing!) There’s also substantive
overlap when it comes to shedding light
on complex global issues, and in verbal
ourishes when it comes to describing the
players. (“ ‘Noncriminal arrests’ is such
an oxymoron. It’s like ‘Chatty Clarence
Thomas’ or ‘Remorseful Louis CK.’ ”) But
Minhaj has given himself a unique feat topull o
: He has approximately six times
the lead-story real estate as Last Week
Tonight, during which he has the task of
making just one news story funny.
“I’m struck by how much my two
daughters like his show,” says Fareed
Zakaria, who bonded with Minhaj dur-
ing a hike at a tech conference last year.
“They’re 16 and 11 and they don’t watch
much political television at all. They don’t
watch my show, for example. But my
11-year-old and I once watched three of
his shows back-to-back—at her request.”
Patriot Act episodes run the gamut,
topically, but Minhaj usually waits for
some kind of back door into a story, both
to di
erentiate it from a 60 Minutes piece
and to give him enough meat on the
bone. The takedown episode of Supremein the ¡rst season “was actually an analy-
sis of the Carlyle Group and the intrinsic
value of hype. It started with hoodies and
allowed me to talk about bomber jets.”
A season four segment on the unioniza-
tion debate within the $139-billion-a-year
video game industry took six months to
jell. As for how the stories are chosen,
Minhaj says that sometimes it starts as
a news story that needs a personal hook
and sometimes it’s a personal story just
waiting for the data points to reveal
themselves. After a friend overdosed
on fentanyl, he felt “the urgency with
the words,” and devoted an episode to this
wave of the opioid crisis. In September,
Minhaj put his face on the student-loan
issue—the focus of a standout season two
episode—when he testi¡ed before Con-
gress, singling out predatory lenders.
“The common denominator among all
comedians is we are mining our own livesfor jokes,” says Mulaney. “I really admire
that Hasan can personalize the news, or
make the news more personal through
metaphor, night after night.”
When it comes to means of personal-
izing his material, second only to meta-
phor is Minhaj’s jones for technology.
He has acknowledged and embraced
screens, both within the format of the
show and how viewers are watching it.
As executive producer and showrun-
ner Steve Bodow says, “Hasan, Prash-
anth [Venkataramanujam, cocreator
and executive producer], and the team
made it a priority to integrate all these
complex animated graphics into every
moment of the show’s onscreen pre-
sentation.” Bodow, who was also a
showrunner on The Daily Show duringSome friends said, “Just imaine sayin
The Daily Show With Hasan Minhaj.
How is Doritos onna put ads up
against that”
VANITY FAIR 145