Hasan Min­haj is the com­ic I need­ed as a teenage immigrant

Ear­li­er this year, com­ic Hasan Min­haj stood at the podi­um of the White House Cor­re­spon­dents’ din­ner. In a room full of jour­nal­ists from some of the country’s biggest media organ­i­sa­tions, he quipped, ​“I would say it is an hon­our to be here, but that would be an alter­na­tive fact. No one want­ed to do this, so of course it lands in the hands of an immi­grant.” He went on to draw com­par­i­son between jour­nal­ists as minori­ties in mod­ern soci­ety: ​“If one of you mess­es up, [the pres­i­dent] blames your entire group.” The speech is spec­tac­u­lar, but it res­onates most per­ti­nent­ly when he aligns his per­son­al his­to­ry with the expe­ri­ence of the most­ly white audience.

Minhaj’s lat­est stand-up spe­cial, Home­com­ing King, is enter­tain­ing in the same sharp and the­atri­cal way. As with his Cor­re­spon­dents’ speech, the laugh­ter he gen­er­ates car­ries a cer­tain bit­ter­ness; his punch­lines are loaded with uncom­fort­able truths – about the mul­ti­fac­eted racism faced by immi­grants and eth­nic minori­ties their whole lives. Par­tic­u­lar­ly affect­ing is the way he describes grow­ing up as a young immi­grant, from his first expe­ri­ence of racism, to being the tar­get of hate crime.

The spe­cial begins in Ali­garh, a small town in India from which Minhaj’s par­ents hail. His father had heard of his mother’s beau­ty – and that her fam­i­ly owned a cam­era – and asked for her hand in mar­riage with­out even meet­ing her. ​“YOLO,” the com­ic jokes, con­trast­ing the courtship to that of his peers’ who ​“swipe for love”. This gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ence acts as a cat­a­lyst for his first real heartbreak.

As a teenag­er, Min­haj devel­oped ​“chem­istry” with his cal­cu­lus part­ner, Bethany Reed. (He had bounced back from con­fess­ing his love to his first crush at age six, who told him ​“You’re the colour of poop.”) They’d chat on AOL Instant Mes­sen­ger, do home­work togeth­er, and even­tu­al­ly she asked him to the prom. But on the big night, he arrived at her doorstep to find a white guy putting a cor­sage on her wrist. Her par­ents apol­o­gised to him, their excuse being that they will be tak­ing photos.

Racism exists on a spec­trum, Min­haj explains. On one end, there are peo­ple like Mr and Mrs Reed, who fed him brown­ies and asked him about his dreams, and whose intol­er­ance is dis­guised in selec­tive lib­er­al­ism. On the oth­er, ordi­nary African-Amer­i­cans fear for their lives in the pres­ence of police offi­cers. Some­where in the mid­dle sits the event that hap­pened out­side Minhaj’s fam­i­ly home the night after ⁹⁄₁₁.

He recalls the phone ring­ing, only for hatred and intol­er­ance to spill from the receiv­er as the voice down the oth­er end snarled the words ​“sand nig­ger” and ​“dune coon”. Out­side, the win­dows to their fam­i­ly car have been smashed; as Min­haj runs up and down his street, eager to con­front the per­pe­tra­tors, his father sim­ply cleans up the shat­tered glass.

While ges­tur­ing his father’s wild-eyed but steady-hand­ed sweep­ing, Min­haj recalls his parent’s words in Hin­di. The phrase is long, and it evoked a famil­iar awk­ward­ness in me – a residue of the embar­rass­ment of being spo­ken to in Man­darin in pub­lic as a teenag­er. But by giv­ing space for phras­es in Hin­di, the com­ic takes pride and own­er­ship of his moth­er tongue. He doesn’t slip into the comedic trope of accents.

The phrase trans­lates to: ​“These things hap­pen, and these things will con­tin­ue to hap­pen. That’s the price we pay for being here.” His father sees racism as inevitable, part of pay­ing ​“The Amer­i­can Dream tax”. The spe­cial is inter­spersed with fan­tas­ti­cal­ly atmos­pher­ic ani­mat­ed slides, and on the screen behind Min­haj the 50 stars of the Amer­i­can flag fall off one by one.

But being born in the US, Min­haj is from a dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion – one of empow­er­ment by the ​“audac­i­ty of equal­i­ty”. He recites his home country’s Con­sti­tu­tion: ​“Life, lib­er­ty, the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. All men are cre­at­ed equal.” The crowd in his home­town of Davos, Cal­i­for­nia erupts, almost drown­ing him out as he empha­sis­es, ​“I’m equal.” As I watched and rewatched this scene, that ini­tial sense of embar­rass­ment was replaced by a feel­ing of triumph.

Minhaj’s com­e­dy soars when align­ing dif­fer­ence. Whether a fam­i­ly emi­grat­ed or stayed in one place, any­one can feel alien­at­ed from their par­ents due to social, polit­i­cal, or cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences. Most can relate to young love pro­hib­it­ed by the fam­i­ly; many know the feel­ing of hav­ing dif­fer­ent atti­tudes towards social issues from the gen­er­a­tion above. The com­ic nor­malis­es the immi­grant par­ent-child rela­tion­ship as uni­ver­sal, and by play­ing home­com­ing king to his own suc­cess sto­ry, he puts the expe­ri­ence of a first gen­er­a­tion immi­grant proud­ly in par­al­lel to that of any oth­er white Amer­i­can. He’s equal.