Vanity Fair UK - 11.2019

of the Muslim world. In that episode,

Minhaj identi   es Saudi Arabia as “the

boy-band manager of 9/11—they didn’t

write the songs, but they helped get the

group together.”

“With Saudi Arabia, they don’t take

dissidents lightly. Also 1.6 billion Mus-

lims around the world have to pray towards

this place,” he says. “My sister was like,

You’re gonna say that onstage? You are

going to call out a country that we all pray

to but you feel does not represent our

screen? Shouldn’t you be at a desk with

a single image over your shoulder?’ And

I’m like: Do you realize how fast and how

many taps we’re doing per second, just

in our day-to-day lives?”

He had been working on the Saudi

Arabia episode for a long time when

the murder of Jamal Khashoggi “put

everything into hyperdrive.” Sud-

denly, the world was watching. What

came out was a cannily pop explana-

tion of the brutal regime at the center

Minhaj’s run, adds, “It doesn’t look like
anything else on television, or whatever
it is we’re calling it now. Hasan is deeply
tuned into that storytelling style. Con-
stantly in motion.”
As Minhaj says, “Net‘ix is like elec-
tricity at this point. Or water—it’s just
this constant ‘ow of content. The medi-
um is the message,” he says. “When we
rst designed the set, some of the older
critics would be like, ‘Isn’t there too
much information happening on the

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