Comedian Sam Jay opens her new HBO stand-up special “Salute Me Or Shoot Me” by admitting not only that she wears Spanx, but that she now stands in front of the audience with her bottom wet because she doesn’t know how you pee in it. Whether any of this is true or not is irrelevant because she has literally made herself the butt of the joke.
Hasan Minhaj, on the other hand, was made a fool of last week, debating not because he admitted in a New Yorker profile that he lied on his comedy specials, but because he lied for the wrong reasons.
What is the difference?
“Every story in my style is based on a kernel of truth,” Minhaj told the magazine. “My comedy Arnold Palmer is 70 percent emotional truth — that’s what happened — and then 30 percent exaggeration, exaggeration, fiction.”
This formula is perfectly fine, and many comedians follow something similar. When you hear a stand-up person say that something happened to them this week or yesterday or even earlier that day, you know they’ve had that joke on the back burner for months, if not years. When a comedian remembers an experience from the past, he may change the dialogue to things he would have liked to have said at that moment, or change small details, because otherwise he would not be in a comedian’s position to explain, “That “You had to be there.” The comedian’s expertise lies in re-creating the experience in the retelling so that you feel as if you were there yourself.
That’s exactly what Whoopi Goldberg said on The View this week when defending a comedian’s right to embellish stories: “If you’re going to take a comic to the point where you’re reviewing stories, you have to understand, a lot of it isn’t accurate what happened, because why should we say exactly what happened? “It’s not that interesting.”
Audiences don’t expect absurdists or surreal, one-line, observational comedians like Steven Wright or the late Mitch Hedberg to achieve 100 percent accuracy. You wouldn’t expect anyone to believe one of Wright’s first jokes on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1982, when he quipped, “Last summer I drove across the country with a friend. We split the driving. We changed every half mile.”
Other comedians appearing in persona (or caricature) have already signaled to us that we shouldn’t take them seriously, be it the late Rodney Dangerfield claiming he had “no respect” or the current Anthony Jeselnik telling jokes , which make him look like the worst person in the world.
And then there are comedians like the late Andy Kaufman, who deliberately misled audiences into wondering if everything he said or did was legitimate.
However, all of these lies are in jest. They are designed to make you laugh harder and harder.
It’s completely different when you’re on stage for personal and professional reasons. Take the backlash Steve Rannazzisi received when the world learned that he had spent more than a decade pretending he had escaped from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks. This is the kind of slander about your resume that works in your favor until you’re found out, whether you’re a politician, a college athletics coach, or even a comedian.
Somewhere in the middle lies the kind of lie that Sebastian Maniscalco used in his latest 2022 Netflix special, “Is It Me?”, in which he claimed that a student at his child’s school had started identifying as a lion , which prompted the teacher to set up a litter box. Maniscalco commented on this on The Last Laugh podcast, saying, “It’s a story I actually heard from someone.” But it turns out he heard it from Joe Rogan, who later admitted that he had merely repeated a Republican’s debunked claim without taking advantage of a “Jamie, can you look that up?” fact-checking. Maniscalco lamented the sensitive audience for being “very enthusiastic about the things that comedians say and think are true.”
This relationship between comedians and their audience has changed greatly in the podcast era, with hours of raw audio recordings in which comedians appear to be more candid and open about their lives and opinions while their audience becomes more loyal and sometimes develops parasocial attachments to the performers, causing that line to become more blurred when the comedian is back on stage telling jokes of varying degrees of veracity.
In the same interview with The Daily Beast, Maniscalco continued, “I just don’t know when it became clear that certain things were taboo when it comes to humor.” That’s what comedians do. They point out everything that’s going on in life and add a humorous touch to it all. But these days that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
But if your joke is about something that isn’t actually going on in life, is the twist humorous for humor’s sake, or to score political points and/or ingratiate yourself with a particular audience?
Which brings us back to Minhaj, who reiterated in his interview with The Daily Beast last year that the “anthrax” incident with his young daughter, which we now know he made up for his recent special, ” was just a sobering wake-up call. Call. At the time, it wasn’t sobering because of his comedy, but because of his private life.
“It was really frightening,” Minhaj told Last Laugh host Matt Wilstein. “There’s really this thing where people say, ‘Oh, comedians have to push the envelope.’ But I remember thinking in that moment, “Oh shit, sometimes the envelope pushes back.” There are consequences for what you say and do. And when it hurts the people who count on you the most and someone as innocent as my daughter, I really have to reevaluate and reexamine what I’m doing here.”
After the New Yorker article came out, Minhaj defended himself by saying that all of his stand-up stories are “based on events that happened to me.” Yes, I was banned from prom because of my race. Yes, a letter was sent to my apartment with powder that almost harmed my daughter. Yes, I had contact with law enforcement during the War on Terror. Yes, I had varicocele repair surgery so we could get pregnant. Yes, I roasted Jared Kushner’s face. I use the tools of standup comedy – exaggeration, changing names and locations, and compressing timelines to tell entertaining stories.”
But when Minhaj claims that it was his interaction with law enforcement that made him a comedian, or that his daughter’s imaginary trip to the emergency room fundamentally changed his comedic outlook, this exaggeration causes his audience to perceive him differently and treated.
And that’s no reason to laugh.