Truth Is What a Comedian Makes of It

From Vulture:

In September, The New Yorker published a story by Clare Malone that detailed five moments from comedian and then-rumored Daily Show host candidate Hasan Minhaj’s specials where he appeared to distort facts in ways that centered himself in stories of racial discrimination or exaggerated his victimhood. In his 2017 Netflix special Homecoming King, for example, Minhaj talks about a white date dumping him the night of the prom because her parents didn’t want them in photos together. When Malone’s reporting called into question the exact timeline and whether the decision was racially motivated, Minhaj defended such decisions to her as being in service of his comedy’s “emotional truth.” The consensus, at least on social media, seemed to be that Minhaj was in the wrong. Then on October 26, Minhaj responded with a very Hasan Minhaj–style video fact-checking The New Yorker’s fact-check, in which he argued that the reporter manipulated quotes and chose not to include critical information. The New Yorker released a statement standing by their reporting, but Minhaj’s defense was enough to split public opinion on which side was more trustworthy.

The story illustrates just how invested fans and assorted onlookers have become in the idea of comedians’ credibility. This is partly attributable to the 21st-century ascent of The Daily Show and political-comedy shows that provided takes on the news, all while the hosts evinced uneasiness with being called “journalists.” A watershed moment occurred in 2004 when Jon Stewart appeared on CNN’s Crossfire and squared off against actual political pundits Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, with many viewers coming away feeling that Stewart was the only one involved who had any journalistic integrity. That same year, a survey revealed that one in five 18-to-29-year-olds got their election news from comedy programs such as The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.

By 2016, with Stewart off the air, Trump running for president, and the content industry booming, there were comedians for seemingly every demographic in America to trust as a source of news or political commentary. We’ve had shows from Stewart acolytes (including Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee), “funny” pundits on Fox News (Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters), and podcasters spanning from the Dirtbag Left (Chapo Trap House) to the Libertarian-ish Joe Rogan Extended Universe (The Tim Dillon Show and Legion of Skanks). Minhaj himself had a Netflix show, Patriot Act, that ran from 2018-2020, underscoring the argument in Malone’s New Yorker piece that comedians such as him have “become the oddball public intellectuals of our time, and, in informing the public, they assume a certain status as moral arbiters.” That perception, however, leaves Minhaj and his peers caught between opposing realities: As a host, he is an authority expected to speak truth to power and adhere to journalistic standards, and as a comic, he is an artist trying to elicit feelings from his audience on a deeper level than if he were to just provide facts and figures.

The relationship that comedians have with the truth has evolved over the last 75 years. While in the past comics were content telling stock jokes or riffing on familiar tropes (wife is bad; mother-in-law is bad; food is bad — and such small portions!), most contemporary comics agree their work should have some kernel of personal truth to it. They just have different perspectives on how to achieve that goal. That tension is something I’ve observed firsthand while interviewing upwards of 200 comedians, including Minhaj, on my podcast Good One over the past seven years. Every performer takes a different approach to stretching, reformatting, and intensifying the truth in their work. Some strive for 100 percent accuracy, going as far as to fact-check with other parties involved in their material. Others try to express their truth based simply on how they remember a given situation. A few invent stories and situations but hope to create something that feels universally true to their audience.

Most often, stand-ups start with the truth and then tinker with the particulars based on audience response. When we spoke in 2020, Bert Kreischer told me about a breakthrough he had while crafting his famous “The Machine” story: the realization that he was too attached to information that would prove the story was true. “I wanted to share things that couldn’t be faked, and that was a mistake,” he said. “I don’t think anyone really cared if it was true or not.”

. . . .

Quick summary of the history of the concept “truth in comedy.” In the 1950s and ’60s, “sick comedians” — your Shelley Bermans, your Lenny Bruces — became models of authenticity, inspired by the great postwar, existentialist-indebted look inward. “Many Americans were attempting to find their ‘real selves,’” wrote Michael J. Arlen in The New Yorker about this movement. “The new entertainers, in addition to playing off on these searches after identity, attempted to gain the goodwill and regard of their audiences by revealing — or, anyway, acknowledging — their ‘real selves.’” A decade passed and Lenny Bruce begot George Carlin and Richard Pryor, both with similar legends of eschewing their mainstream audience and clean-cut presentation in exchange for something more shaggy and “authentic.” Late-’70s Pryor modeled how various forms of truth-telling interweave with each other to earn an audience’s trust, mixing pitch-perfect behavioral impressions with dead-on observational comedy with an exploration of his inner self with openness about his faults and failures with challenging social critique. Then, reacting to the corporatization of stand-up-comedy clubs in the 1980s, ’90s comics showed their authenticity by, say it with me, “not selling out.” This resulted in, for example, Bill Hicks railing against advertising, fashioning himself a sort of maverick, saying things in interviews like, “I’ll continue to be me. As Bob Dylan said, the only way to live outside the law is to be totally honest. So I will remain lawless.” And alternative comedians in the 1990s at shows like L.A.’s UnCabaret, where everyone was required to bring completely new material and discuss things they haven’t talked about before, reacted to the rigid observational jokes and tight, late-night-ready five-minute sets of the ’80s by trying to not perform at all, espousing the mantra of “Fewer jokes; more you.”

Now, the perceived culmination of a lot of these ideals —

Louis C.K. In the story of comedy’s march to be taken more seriously, C.K. was, for nearly a decade, its avatar. And at the center of this celebration was “truth.” The Los Angeles Review of Books called him “television’s most honest man.” The New Yorker wrote in 2015, in an article about a new C.K. special, “Comedians are seen as honest populists: laughter, we think, not only feels good but teases out universal truths.” This perception didn’t come out of nowhere but was cultivated through work and actions that either were genuine or seemed to be.

Link to the rest at Vulture

PG suggests that an audience assumes that entertainers will entertain. Different groups of people and different audiences will vary in their preference for various styles of entertainment.

If truth-telling is entertaining to an audience, the truth-telling entertainer has done her/his job. If exaggerating various truths is entertaining for an audience, the entertainer has succeeded. If fabulizing is entertaining to an audience, the entertainer has succeeded in entertaining the audience.

In the 21st Century, “truth” has, unfortunately, become a malleable commodity. Personal truths are often given the same sort of respect as objective truths. PG is an old-fashioned guy who believes that objective truths are something different than “lived experience” because it’s pretty much impossible to verify that “lived experience” actually happened as opposed to being embellishment or outright lies in the furtherance of some end, another goal, good or bad, than telling the objective truth.

But PG could be wrong. Happens all the time.