Hasan Minhaj Breaks Bad

In his new Netflix special, Off With His Head, comedian Hasan Minhaj begins the show with a fake-out. “You know what I love when I look out here tonight?” he asks the audience at the San Jose Civic. “I love the diversity.” Before anyone has time to groan at the preachiness of the sentiment — a reaction Minhaj is not unfamiliar with eliciting — he clarifies: “Not racially. Financially.” The bit about income disparity that follows is pricklier than the comedian’s stand-up audience is used to seeing from him; he quite literally divides the room. It’s his way of signaling that he’s not your grandmother’s — or, more accurately, your cringe millennial cousin’s — Minhaj anymore.

It’s a savvy rebrand for a figure who found himself embroiled in a quasi-scandal in 2023 after a New Yorker article uncovered a series of lies and exaggerations he’d included in his previous stand-up specials (Homecoming King and The King’s Jester) for dramatic effect. In the discourse that followed, critics pointed out that the story wouldn’t have had legs if Minhaj hadn’t risen to fame by positioning himself as a morally righteous, oft-persecuted authority figure. It’s only natural the comedian should want to distance himself from that image now.

Step one of that transformation began in July, when Minhaj launched his YouTube talk show, Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know. In it, he takes on the role of an interviewer asking thorny questions to cultural juggernauts, rather than a know-it-all didact. He takes steps two, three, and four in Off With His Head. Gone are the PowerPoint comedy and theatrical solo-show framings with which Minhaj burnished his reputation. In their place is straight stand-up, the irreverent content of which is carefully crafted to say, Not only am I not a scold and a victim, I’m actually kind of a privileged asshole. In one bit, he calls himself an “insufferable fucking loser” for his 2019 appearance on Ellen, which went viral because he corrected Ellen DeGeneres’s mispronunciation of his name. He wants the audience to know that this version of him — the person who would score points on perceived slights — is gone.

How successfully he pulls off this pivot varies from bit to bit. Even with all his newfound bluster, Minhaj has a tendency to rely more on attitude and performance to sell jokes than surprising punch lines. (“Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so bad she was willing to sit in the same office …”) But in the special’s best bit, about why an increasing number of brown people and immigrants in America — a subset Minhaj calls “Beigeistan” — have begun to vote Republican, his new persona clicks into place. It begins with Minhaj implicating himself. “Do you know what I would let a politician call me if I could pay zero percent federal income tax?” he asks, shedding the holier-than-thou progressive image he’s built. “I would let you body-cavity search me at every airport, spit in my mouth, and call me a terrorist.” He uses this momentum as a way to implicate his “Beigeistan” audience: “We are way more practical than we are progressive,” he observes, earning an applause break. Then, after everyone’s onboard, he delivers a scathing critique of diaspora communities and their tendency to vote out of self-interest. After listing the four issues on which these communities vote — “No. 1: Give me a green card, No. 2: Believe in God, No. 3: I don’t like paying taxes, and No. 4: Don’t bomb my home country” — he drops into a mischievous tone and says, “But if you give me No. 1, I’ll let you do No. 4.” 

It’s a bold move to stare down your audience and tell them that they’re complicit in the death and destruction of people who look like them all over the world. The Minhaj of Homecoming King — the hero who spoke out about the victimhood diaspora communities in America must endure and triumphantly declared that he had the “audacity of equality” — could never have pulled it off. The Minhaj of The King’s Jester might have done so, but the format of that special would have demanded he do it less interestingly: while staring intensely into the camera and pleading for the soul of humanity in a performatively hushed tone.

At a few points in Off With His Head, Minhaj addresses the New Yorker fact-checking debacle directly. In the most direct instance of this, he says he drives a BMW 3 Series, then makes sure to correct himself and clarify that he drives a Kia Carnival. “So, if you want to fact-check me,” he continues, but the audience pop one might expect at the mention of this pseudo-controversy doesn’t arrive. “I don’t know if you saw this last year —” he’s forced to add before teeing up the story. The joke he delivers to address it, then, feels almost like an afterthought. “Now I have a ‘Controversies’ tab on my Wikipedia,” he says, exasperated. “It’s a dorky controversy! It’s not even a good one. I didn’t fuck a porn star. I didn’t diddle a boy. I got caught embellishing for dramatic effect.” More striking than the joke itself are the reference points he uses within it. The once-moralistic Minhaj is joking about fucking sex workers and molesting kids. Lying, by extension, seems quaint.