"At one point in his show, he said the real divide in the country was not between rich and poor, Democratic or Republican, but between 'the insane' and 'the insufferable.'"

"The insane include the people who stormed the capitol. He calls them nuts, before adding: 'but fun.' Then he grew more animated describing the insufferable by their 'NPR tote-bag energy' and 'hall monitor' tendencies.... Minhaj... repositions him[self] less as a righteous political comic than a more self-questioning, personal comic, a move he had already begun to make; this scandal may have accelerated the shift...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Was a Scandal the Best Thing to Happen to Hasan Minhaj? At the Beacon, the comic took a different tack after posting a video rebutting a New Yorker article on fabrications in his work. The crowd went wild" (NYT).

Zinoman likes that Minaj isn't "playing the victim," like "seemingly everyone" these days, including Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. And Zinoman, in a sidetrack, praises the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, and gives a tip about a new movie I might want to see:

"Nobody really gets scolded for being a sellout anymore. In the three decades since its heyday, in the late eighties and early nineties..."

"... the term has grown to seem a bit old-fashioned. The people who came of age during or after the 2008 financial crisis, for example, understandably do not have much patience for Gen X-ers who wax nostalgic about bands that ignored major-record-label attention or Adbusters or whatever else. The rent is high, and the bills don’t stop. Precarity is everywhere...."

That's the first paragraph of "Ibram X. Kendi, Hasan Minhaj, and the Question of Selling Out/Is it possible to reap all the rewards of the mass market and still maintain a sense of political purpose?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker). 

"People don’t necessarily go into standup shows expecting airtight truths. They expect laughs, perhaps some trenchant observation...."

"[Hasan] Minhaj described his work as 'the dynamic range that theatre and storytelling and comedy allow you to explore.' Does that mean audiences should expect his words onstage to stringently hew to the facts on the ground? The slipperiness of memoir finds a new dimension when it’s played for laughs in front of a crowd...."

Writes Clare Malone, in "Hasan Minhaj’s 'Emotional Truths'/In his standup specials, the former 'Patriot Act' host often recounts harrowing experiences he’s faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?" (The New Yorker).