Patriot Act<\/em>.<\/p>\nCertainly, Minhaj is far from the first comedian to exaggerate, embellish, or outright lie for laughs. Indeed, there is a long and noble tradition of lying for laughter. If a silly story makes you guffaw in amusement, there is no need for it to be true.<\/p>\n
But Minhaj’s stand-up fabrications weren’t just jokes. In some cases they weren’t even jokes at all, and weren’t presented as tall tales: They were presented as clear-eyed truths about American prejudice. In that\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0story, Minhaj explicitly defended the use of falsehoods to make a point more powerful. “The punch line,” he told Malone, “is worth the fictionalized premise.” In his defense video, he says he “made artistic choices to express myself and drive home larger issues affecting me and my community.”<\/p>\nMoreover, although\u00a0Patriot Act<\/em>\u00a0had a research department with fact checkers, Minhaj reportedly found them frustrating. “In one instance,” Malone wrote, “Minhaj grew frustrated that fact-checking was stymying the creative flow during a final rewrite, and a pair of female researchers were asked to leave the writers’ room.”<\/p>\nMinhaj’s work on\u00a0Patriot Act<\/em>\u00a0was what made him a potential successor to Stewart and Noah on\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>. But in late October, online news outlet\u00a0Puck\u00a0<\/em>reported that although Minhaj had nearly closed a deal to take the reins at\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>, he would not be getting the gig.<\/p>\nWhen Stewart left\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>\u00a0in 2015, he used his final monologue to issue a warning about the world of news and commentary. “Bullshit is everywhere,” he said. “There is very little in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with bullshit.” While some minor exaggeration was innocuous and even necessary to function socially, he said, viewers needed to be on the lookout for “the more pernicious bullshit. Your premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract. Designed by who? The bullshitocracy.”<\/p>\nHe had some good news, though. “Bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy,” Stewart said. “And their work is easily detected.”<\/p>\n
The post Comedy's Truthiness Problem<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hasan Minhaj\u2019s stand-up tests the boundaries of fact and fiction. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[10,19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97569"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}