Hasan Minhaj’s comedy special
It’s no surprise that comedians have a proclivity for duality. The strongest ironies lie within dichotomies: the poverty of the rich, the generosity of the miserly, and the idiocy of the intelligent.
In his latest show, “Off with His Head” — the third installment of his royalty-themed tours, following “Homecoming King” and “The King’s Jester” — Hasan Minhaj appends another, rather more original, dyad to the familiar list: the insane and the insufferable.
Per Minhaj, the insane are the Capitol-stormers — the MAGA sycophants who immerse themselves in QAnon conspiracy. The insufferable, on the other hand, are the nit-picking, NPR tote bag–lugging “mouth-breathers” — in other words, those who (in a not-so-subtle reference to a certain New Yorker journalist) might just choose to fact-check one specific comedian’s specials in their free time.
This split mirrors larger discrepancies between Minhaj’s most recent tour and its predecessors: Unlike his previous shows, “Off with His Head” comes with a particularly large dose of witty (if bitter) self-awareness, and politics play second fiddle to more relatable stories. It’s simple: there are no gimmicks, no PowerPoint images or graphs, no tales of sparring with dictators. And Minhaj himself — while still the indefatigable “raccoon on Adderall” — is slightly less exuberant.
New Yorker backlash
Looming large, of course, is the September New Yorker article that attempted to poke holes in Minhaj’s anecdotes in “Homecoming King” and “The King’s Jester.” While Minhaj issued a 21-minute YouTube video to rebut some of the article’s claims, he also touched on the controversy during the show, noting that condemning a comic who embellishes is akin to indicting a magician who fails to perform true magic. Throughout the special, he urges the audience — jokingly, of course — not to “fact-check” him on stories he describes and on the hypothetical scenarios he builds.
At first glance, these accusations don’t influence his delivery: he is as charismatic and irrepressible as ever. Yet they perhaps play a role in his choice of building smaller stories, less connected thematically than his previous specials. In the past, Minhaj has “embellished” anecdotes so that each one built toward a larger narrative arc: “Every beat has to do multiple things in a funny and impactful way,” he said in his response to the New Yorker article. In “Off with His Head,” he shies away from these sweeping narratives, instead focusing on quotidian struggles.
Exploring legacy
Consistent with Minhaj’s Netflix specials, though, this one has an emotional undercurrent matching his progression in life — this time, into middle age. “Homecoming King” saw him stepping into adulthood, learning to embrace the immigrant identity and have the “audacity of equality,” as he so eloquently put it. In “The King’s Jester,” Minhaj examined his relationship with his newfound fame and explored the role of comedy as a great equalizer (no one can “buy [their] way out of ridicule,” he asserted). “Off with His Head,” instead, explores legacy: Minhaj grapples with which aspects of his identity are “heirlooms” to pass on versus “baggage” to be dropped off.
While he has discussed intergenerational trauma before, Minhaj leans into it this time, discussing culturally informed therapy and Eastern versus Western perceptions of personal boundaries. Indeed, his last words are a reminder to his son to never lock his door — a taboo in many brown households. His “kink,” he reveals — as someone with “good-child syndrome” — is acceptance.
Articulating idiosyncrasies
This shift in delivery — from sweeping epics to smaller narratives — isn’t entirely unwelcome. I had already felt somewhat of a disconnect when watching “The King’s Jester”: Minhaj’s comedy centered on his identity as a public figure, making him less relatable. His return to the small imbues this tour with a quality the composer Leonard Bernstein once attributed to Beethoven: a “gift of inevitability,” an ability to articulate the idiosyncrasies of the immigrant community in the most perfect ways.
What amazed me most was the specificity of these quirks. I watched the show in San Francisco, and Minhaj’s opening jokes weren’t about brown America as a whole — they were about brown people in the Bay Area, including the stark dualities present in the room itself (some audience members, he noted, were residents of Los Altos Hills; others occupied their parents’ basement in San Jose). He nailed the Silicon Valley ethos — the “rat race” of success — and the pockets of right-wing sentiment within a liberal enclave. While TikTok harms 13-year-old girls, he argues, Zillow emasculates 40-year-old software engineers.
Pitch-perfect examples
This level of specificity extends beyond the introduction, with smaller digs interwoven throughout the performance. In this show, Minhaj touches on subjects he hasn’t fully excavated in others — namely, racism within the Asian community, as well as toxic masculinity. Every man, he contends, has a “little Andrew Tate” in him — a part of him that thinks he could beat a WNBA player in basketball. (Pitch-perfect examples like these lend him the “gift of inevitability” — what better way is there to put it?) Yet Minhaj extends the joke into crypto and AI — the Silicon Valley–specific manifestations of “male hubris.”
Even jokes about racism within the Asian community are leveled at the Silicon Valley “try-hard” ethos. We “try so hard,” he jokes, that we end affirmative action. We’re willing to push aside whomever we need to get to the top, whether they be Black or Chinese, to get what we need. Minhaj sees his audience for who they are, and while it’s jarring, it’s also stunningly accurate.
A little tamer?
While I enjoyed Minhaj’s latest show, as always (including its physicality; he knocked down his stool on purpose multiple times) I still wished for more of the political kick his comedy usually has. He touches on current issues (in a particularly funny jab, he likened a debate between Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley to a spat between an uncle and a Punjabi aunty in a grocery store), discussing Hunter Biden and briefly mentioning Israel and Palestine, but doesn’t go much further. This may have been a wholly creative choice, but I can’t help but wonder whether the New Yorker article pushed him to keep this show a little tamer, a little less inflammatory. It’s a pity, since Minhaj’s brash honesty might do some good right now. Rather than grant him a public execution, a true “off with his head,” we might instead invite him back into the court.
