![]() ![]() And I was just like, "Amazing!" And, coincidentally, Ben Affleck was on the show that day, there was this clip that went extremely viral about how Ben Affleck kind of stood up for Muslims and was like, "Hey, you can't just put them in internment camps. I was like, "I have one good piece in me." But, coincidentally enough, Bill Maher on his show did a thing where he was extremely Islamaphobic and it's great how racist people work like clockwork. I didn't think I could Larry David the situation into a Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. They wanted me to write another piece and I was like, "Oh, shit, I have to write another original piece?" I only had one good piece in me. Jon saw my tape, two days later they asked me to screen test in New York. I put together an audition tape and just sent it out it was like a video link. Like, that would be my dream to be on The Daily Show. It had always been something I wanted to do. That's what's happening." It was a dream gig. It's more of a demand: "You're auditioning for The Daily Show. And I don't think it's an email that deserves a question mark it's usually a period or an exclamation point. How did you end up getting the gig at the Daily Show? Michael Che had left to do Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live and I got an email from my manager and the email was like, "Do you want to audition for The Daily Show?" I remember the subject header of that email. Paul Provenza, who was a huge mentor for me on this project, told me something really interesting in regards to storytelling: "Well with standup you can play notes from A to M, but with storytelling and presenting comedy in the narrative and the narrative on stage through storytelling, you can play notes A through M as well as M through Z." And I found that to be really powerful and amazing. I got into what Mike Birbiglia was doing and Spalding Gray and how the medium itself can evolve and change. Performing it for years and years got me into long-form storytelling. I was like, "Oh, this is what stand-up comedy is? This is the license they have to express their thoughts freely on stage? This is incredible." That's how I got into comedy. I remember telling my friends that I thought stand-up comedy was like the thing that happened before the episode of Seinfeld I grew up in a pretty strict household in the sense that we just didn't have cable, so I wasn't familiar with what stand-up comedy was. How did you get into comedy? I started in college. We found these really organic threads that came through the whole show and we ended up calling it Hasan Minhaj Homecoming King: The Story of Brown America. I worked on it together with my director Greg Walloch and my interactions with this person continued and it documents a lot of those things.Ĭoincidentally enough, me getting hired at The Daily Show and coming to New York capped all of those events. The local newspaper in my town picked it up and was like, "Who's Hasan Minhaj, who's Bethany Reeve, did this thing really happen?" What I found really interesting about it is that this story of love, forgiveness, racial tension and self-hate and all of these things kind of kept on evolving and breathing as time went on. It really resonated with a lot of people and kind of took on a life of its own. The story was so popular online Catherine Burns was the creative director and said, "You should really develop something around this story." It's an exploration of what I call the new brown America, the first- generation experience of what a lot of kids go through growing up in the United States of America. It's sort of an extrapolation of that night, what happened, what happened from there. The genesis of it was this popular story I told on this Moth radio hour about me speaking out and going to prom and what happened that night. It was curated at the Sundance New Frontier Storyteller's Lab. Homecoming King is a solo show I've been developing over the past couple years. Tell us a little about what we can expect from Homecoming King. We caught up with him to discuss diversity in comedy, new Daily Show host Trevor Noah, and the Wyatt Cenac/Jon Stewart fight. Now, he's got a new show, Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, which centers on his experience growing up as first generation Indian American and Muslim in a small agricultural city in California, debuting at the Cherry Lane Theater next week. It's been about a year since comedian Hasan Minhaj joined the Daily Show 's team of correspondents-since then, he's skewered everything from discrimination of Muslim Americans to gestation crates to #PopeMania. ![]()
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