Truthful Comedy
They say that comedians get the most laughs when they are able to reveal a truth everybody knows but few acknowledge. I mean, hopefully they say that. Otherwise I would’ve just lied. Or at the very least misrepresented a position held by a nebulous “They”. I also don’t want to take credit for what seems to be a pretty vanilla idea. The best comedy hints at universal truths. But what if *most* comedy is built on a stack of lies? It is storytelling after all. Most bits have a lot of added spice in them.
I’m thinking more about truth in comedy because one of the bigger but more random news stories of the last week was news that Hasan Minhaj, our beloved brown comic, has been lying about all those purported stories that happened to him.
He wasn’t stood up for prom because of racism
His mosque wasn’t infiltrated by an FBI agent
His family wasn’t sent anthrax.
All these things happened in bits and pieces to other people and he sort of combined them all at the end. This has left a lot of his fans shocked and disappointed. I get why. I was sort of disappointed as well. Comedians have long been arbiters of truth in America. They often have larger followings than major news channels and their comedic takes are more memorable.
Even worse (to me) than a few lies in his standup special, Hasan has also been accused by some of his previous fact-checking writing staff on the patriot act of bending the truth in favor of the story and removing them from the writing room when they became too attached to what they deem is the truth.
All in all, not a great week for our guy who lit up the stage in a white house correspondent’s dinner all those years ago. This got me thinking, what if we simply required all comedians to tell the truth? Maybe not on stage of course, but maybe right after? As part of the end credits, there’s a list of all the instances of lies, fibs, exaggeration, manipulation, gesticulation, aggrandizing, minimizing, demonizing and outright victimizing that went on in the standup. People don’t just need a reminder that comedy *is* generally fake. They need the banana peeled for them. And potentially fed to them in tiny, tiny morsels.
Is there a notion of “truth” anyway that’s worth preserving at the expense of comedy? Join us on the pod as we discuss.