Hasan
Minhaj was always my favorite correspondent on The Daily Show, so it’s only fitting that, since there’s no News
Satire Roundup this week and the show’s last new episode featured his goodbye
piece, I should review his standup special.
This is a special that fell through a “so much good stuff to watch, so
little time” crack for me, even though I’d heard nothing but great things about
it, and I’m glad to have (finally) gotten around to seeing it.
This was
my first time seeing Hasan perform outside of The Daily Show or things like the White House Correspondents’
Dinner. I like that, taking a comedian
that you’ve only seen within a very specific context and then seeing what
they’re like when they’re calling all the shots. Obviously, aspects of his overall vibe and
performance style remain the same, but it’s cool to see how he’s different in a
standup context.
This is
such well-put-together standup. There’s
the fact that Hasan has come armed with family photos, rudimentary charts, key
Hindi phrases, old social media messages, and national spelling bee footage,
all projected onto the wall behind him, but it’s more than that. It’s the construction of the entire
piece. The anecdotes and routines flow
effortlessly into one another – really, it feels like one continuous story,
following a natural progression and featuring numerous callbacks and
full-circle moments. Hasan begins with
his immigrant parents and his upbringing, spinning us a tale of conditional
love, racism, prom dates, and professional struggles/successes, straddling that
millennial dichotomy of being raised on dial-up and coming of age with social
media.
Hasan
makes an early observation that every conversation with his father is like “an
M. Night Shyamalan movie” (because immigrant parents love secrets,) and there’s
an aspect of that to his standup as well.
His stories are peppered with twists – not just the usual deployment of
comic surprise but genuine “can you believe this shit?!” moments from his life,
along with sudden changes in tone as his accounts flit from hilarious to
sobering and back again.
As for
the content, there’s so much amazing stuff here. I won’t spoil any of the big twists in the
stories, but I’ll hit on some of my favorite non-spoilery parts of the
special. Hasan’s earliest birthday
memory with his immigrant father. His
explanation of the phrase “log kya kyenge,” which causes a star to fall from
the sky every time it’s uttered. His
riff on older and younger siblings.
Watching his father sweep up broken glass from the hate crime committed
outside their home after 9/11, especially looking at their different reactions
to what happened – his father expecting to pay the “American dream tax,” racism
in exchange for opportunity, while the American-born Hasan has the “audacity”
to expect equality. The turn of events
taken in adulthood with Bethany Reed.
His experience of meeting John Stewart for the first time.
So, so
awesome. I’m going to miss Hasan on The Daily Show, but I know he’s got more
stuff of his own lined up, so good for him.
Warnings
No comments:
Post a Comment