A New Special Finds Hasan Minhaj Relaxed, Confident, and Ready to Move Past the Backlash

Eighteen minutes into his new Netflix special, Off With His Head, Hasan Minhaj addresses the controversy that shook up the comedy world and ricocheted into the mainstream last year, raising questions about the role of truth in storytelling and the very nature of the artistic process. When Minhaj finally brings up the subject here, in his third special, the live Bay Area audience members sit up a little straighter in their chairs. Some even exchange a knowing glance.

“I don’t know if you saw this,” Minhaj says with a smirk. “Last year, The New Yorker fact-checked my stand-up comedy.” He then pantomimes a journalist typing into their keyboard, and begins to laugh. “They were just like, Ahahaha. Breaking news: Magicians aren’t wizards,” he says. 

That’s not quite what happened. In September 2023, The New Yorker published an article challenging the authenticity of personal stories Minhaj told in his first two stand-up specials, Homecoming King (2017) and The King's Jester (2022). Minhaj was quick to confirm he had taken artistic liberties with the facts, but that the stories, which concerned racism he faced as an American of Indian descent and Muslim faith in the wake of 9/11, contained “emotional truths” and were based on lived experiences. He slammed the reporting—which the magazine defended—as misleading.

The reporting and Minhaj’s response seemed to test the limits of what John Oliver, a fellow Daily Show alumnus, once identified as the “internal logic” of comedy: “You’ll do anything for a laugh, like a sociopath.” But that was in July 2016, before phrases like “alternative facts” and a new golden age of disinformation came to dominate the greater media ecosystem. 

At the time of the Scandal, Minhaj was best known as a former correspondent on The Daily Show and then later the host of his own Netflix program, Patriot Act. As a performer known for offering insightful, comedic takes on current events, often in the style of investigative journalism, to be branded as a fabricator seemed like a knockout blow. Minhaj said the Scandal led to the termination of a nearly final offer to host The Daily Show after the departure of Trevor Noah—apparently, Comedy Central felt viewers would no longer trust him to deliver even the funny news.

Since then, audiences have waited for Minhaj to address the controversy head on in his comedy. The special’s title certainly seems like a gesture towards the backlash. But in Off With His Head, Minhaj spends surprisingly little time on the article and subsequent controversy—perhaps he feels the 20-minute video defense he posted last October was enough. In the special, Minhaj finds one new word to describe the Scandal: “dorky.” “It’s not even a good one. I didn’t f-ck a porn star. I didn’t diddle a boy,” he says. “I got caught embellishing for dramatic effect. Same crime your aunt is guilty of over Thanksgiving.”

While the controversy is but one part of the hour-long special, its presence can be felt in its overall structure and tone. In defending himself last fall, Minhaj made a distinction between what he does on comedy news programs and his work on stage during a stand-up show. The former is “political comedy,” which must be grounded in truth and rigorously fact-checked, he said. The latter, in his words, is “comedic storytelling,” which foregrounds emotion.

On the comedic spectrum Minhaj’s outlines, Off With His Head operates more in the tradition of political comedy. It has the feel of a classic stand-up set, marking a stark contrast with Homecoming King and The King’s Jester. Those two specials played like one-man, off-Broadway shows, or an evening at The Moth. The specials featured dynamic movements of the camera, sweeping in and out of the stage, sometimes right into Minhaj’s face so that he could directly address the non-theatrical audience, heightening the dramatic effect of his stories.

In Off With His Head, rather than captivate his audience with grand tales, Minhaj instead opts for a more observational mode, a tight set of jokes strung together to offer his take on topics like Politics, race, and Zillow, with a collection of personal anecdotes sprinkled throughout. It is as if Minhaj anticipated his audience’s expectation of an epic retelling of The New Yorker saga, only to then briefly mention it and continue to show off his craft in a different comedic style. The new special plays like an implicit response to anyone who doubted his stand-up abilities in the wake of the Scandal: he may have embellished, but it was not as a crutch. Off With His Head is just as good, if not at times better, than any of his previous work. Critics of Minhaj’s stand-up bona fides must step aside. 

Underpinning much of Minhaj’s special is the vantage point of a millennial American, a perspective that is mostly absent from the hosting chairs of American late night comedy, with the notable exception of the rotating cast of hosts on The Daily Show, who must be more impersonal as part of their shared duties. Here, Minhaj, by contrast, can foreground the personal. With edge, he vents the deepest frustrations of his generation. Take the coronavirus, for example. While some saw catastrophe, Minhaj saw a missed opportunity. For years, millennials complained about a housing shortage in the United States. “And then, in March of 2020, God was like, here,” Minhaj said in the voice of God, “here is a disease that specifically kills old people.” 

But perhaps the greatest contrast between Off With His Head and the first two specials is Minhaj’s own disposition on stage. In the earlier work, one could feel every beat of the performance, the delivery of each joke impeccable, but palpably the byproduct of rehearsal. In the new special, Minhaj feels relaxed, confident in a way that conveys more experience. With controversy and dozens of stories from his past behind him, the special centers his own thoughts on where we are now and where we are going—and boy can we use all the help we can get.