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Curious
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The American dream meant something different for my ancestors in the 19th century than it did when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his speech during the March on Washington, than it did when Hasan Minhaj’s parents arrived in Davis, Calif., from India in the early 1980s, than it does even for an immigrant in Trump’s America of 2017.
Sure, we’re all as Americans hoping for a better life, more freedom and as much happiness as we can pursue. Although the specifics in defining and describing that happiness varies over both time and circumstances.
As Minhaj jokes in his first Netflix special, Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, “I popped out here. Anybody brown, we popped out here, we made it. We’re the rappers that made it.”
And indeed, he has.
“This has been a very good year for me,” Minhaj says, and he could have referred to any of the past few years.
This story arrives with everyone fully aware of its happy ending. In the past couple of years, Minhaj not only landed a job as a correspondent for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (one of Jon Stewart’s final on-air hires), gotten married, and while developing Homecoming King for the stage, delivered the 2016 keynote address for the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, and this year for the White House Correspondents Dinner. At the latter, boycotted by President Trump and his full administration, Minhaj received a rare standing ovation at the conclusion of his remarks.
Earlier this June, at Comedy Central’s first Colossal Clusterfest in San Francisco, Minhaj received the largest roar of approval walking onstage of anyone not billed as one of the festival’s headliners. An over-capacity 7,500 inside the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium embracing the comedian as one of their own.
But for Netflix, Minhaj truly went home, back north by northeast along I-80 to Davis, for a triumphant theatrical homecoming.
Minhaj not only grew up with “the audacity of equality,” but did so in the most populous city in Yolo County, although the only time the comedian drops the YOLO slang is to describe how and why his father decided to marry his mother in an almost pre-arranged union, which Minhaj translates to his Millennial cohorts as “Tinder with no photos.”
He may have popped out brown in California, but in the late 1980s into the early 1990s, Minhaj learned the hard ways of racism and prejudice as the only brown kid in school; his first eight years with only his father (himself, the only brown guy at work) while his mother returned to India for med school.
A large collage of screens behind the comedian illustrates his story, whether it’s to shine a spotlight on our national spelling bee to humorously prove how Indian-American kids stay cool, calm and collected thanks to strict parenting, to make fun of Minhaj’s own early TV appearances, or to amplify his social media communications.
When the camera’s not focused on him in relation to those screens, it’s often willing to zoom in on Minhaj as he either acts out part of his story or playing directly to the camera.
Even now in his 30s, Minhaj carries a very visible, wide-eyed innocence (onstage, he’ll joke that his look more resembles an Indian boy band member). But there’s not just innocence, but also passion in his expressiveness, which could break out at any time, it seems, into tears or rage.
The first half of his special zeroes in on his new nuptials, and his Muslim family preparing to meet his Hindu fiancée and her family.
The second half goes back to his high-school years, and a white girl he expected to take to prom.
He reminds us that in America, we only tend to address racial difficulties and division when violence exposes them in the worst ways. But the problems of racism and prejudice don’t go away between tragedies. As Minhaj says of growing up brown and Muslim in white little-city California: “I didn’t know that people could be bigoted even as they were smiling at me.” He learned, though.
With each generation, we seem to make incremental progress toward a more inclusive, more multi-racial, more tolerant nation.
It’s up to us, then, to speak up when our parents or grandparents expose their intolerance, their insecurities by asking what Minhaj says are the most disturbing words he could hear from his parents: “Log kya kahenge?”
What will people think?
When you hear those words, hopefully you’ll have the ability to answer them, or at least have a little sister like Minhaj does to have your back.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
