Hasan Minhaj

Hasan Minhaj (/ˈhʌsən ˈmɪnhɑː(d)ʒ/ HUSS-ən MIN-hahzh, -⁠hahj; born September 23, 1985) is an American comedian, writer, producer, actor, and television host. Much of his comedy involves Indian culture and the modern American political landscape through the use of satire, observational comedy and dark comedy. His Netflix series Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and two Webby Awards. In 2019, he was listed in Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
After working as a stand-up comedian and appearing in minor television roles, Minhaj came to prominence for his work on The Daily Show as its senior correspondent from 2014 to 2018. He was the featured speaker at the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. His first stand-up comedy special, Homecoming King, released on Netflix in May 2017, received positive reviews from critics and won him his first Peabody Award in 2018.
Minhaj left The Daily Show in August 2018 to host a weekly comedy show, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, which debuted on Netflix in October 2018. In April 2019, he won his second Peabody Award for Patriot Act. Minhaj released his second Netflix special, Hasan Minhaj: The King's Jester, in 2022, and appeared in season two of the Apple TV+ drama series The Morning Show in a recurring role.
In September 2023, The New Yorker published an article claiming instances of Minhaj embellishing or exaggerating various anecdotes and stories that were part of his comedy specials and repeated in interviews. Minhaj responded to the reporting, saying it was taken out of context, and provided the surrounding context to the interview snippets in a YouTube interview.
Hasan Minhaj was born on September 23, 1985, in Davis, California, to Indian Muslim parents from Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh. His parents, Najme and Seema Minhaj (née Usmani) immigrated to the United States from India. After his birth, he and his father, an organic chemist, remained in the U.S. His mother returned to India for eight years to complete medical school, visiting the U.S. after three years to give birth to his sister in 1989. Minhaj attended Davis Senior High School, graduating in 2003. He graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 2007.
While in college, he became interested in comedy after seeing Chris Rock's Never Scared (2004), the first stand-up special he watched. He began traveling to San Francisco to perform. In 2008, he won Wild 94.9's "Best Comic Standing" competition, which resulted in his working as an opening act for Katt Williams, Pablo Francisco and Gabriel Iglesias. He also worked part-time for the website Ning, an experience he used to write comedy. Minhaj lists Kevin Shea, W. Kamau Bell and Arj Barker as inspirations.
In 2009, Minhaj moved to Los Angeles to perform on NBC's Stand-up for Diversity, on which he was a finalist. In 2011, he was recurring on the TV sitcom State of Georgia and starred in various roles on the MTV hidden camera show Disaster Date. Through posting on YouTube, he was cast as the host of Failosophy on MTV. In 2013, Minhaj appeared in guest roles on Arrested Development and Getting On. He hosted Stand Up Planet in 2013 and a web series, The Truth with Hasan Minhaj, in 2014. In 2014, he voiced Rabi Ray Rana in the video game Far Cry 4.
On November 19, 2014, Minhaj joined The Daily Show as a correspondent, the last one hired by then-host Jon Stewart. Minhaj was asked to come in for an audition with new material after he sent in a tape of him performing an idea for a Daily Show segment, but he initially panicked as he had no other material prepared. The Friday before Minhaj's audition, Ben Affleck and Bill Maher got into a heated exchange about Islam on Maher's show, and Minhaj used this for a new sketch he called "Batman vs. Bill Maher".
On June 18, 2016, Minhaj performed a set as the host of the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner. The set gained attention for his condemnation of the United States Congress' inaction in passing gun control legislation. On April 29, 2017, Minhaj was the featured speaker at the 2017 White House Correspondents' Dinner, where he took on the traditional role of roasting Washington, D.C. society, national politics, current events, the current president, the Washington press corps and the American media. He criticized U.S. President Donald Trump, who was boycotting the dinner, calling him the "liar in chief," and stating: "Only in America can a second-generation, Indian American Muslim kid get on the stage and make fun of the president." He also reminded the press to do their job, and added: "I want to thank all of you. I want to thank Woodward and Bernstein for inspiring a generation of journalists, and I would like to thank Donald Trump for inspiring the next."
Minhaj's one-man show, Homecoming King, debuted Off-Broadway in October 2015. The show featured a central theme of the immigrant experience in the United States today, illustrated with stories from Minhaj's life as a second-generation Indian-American Muslim. He later turned the show into his first stand-up special, Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, which premiered on Netflix on May 23, 2017. The special was filmed at the Mondavi Center at Minhaj's alma mater, UC Davis, in January 2017, and won a television Peabody Award.
In March 2018, Netflix announced that Minhaj would host his own weekly show on the platform. The new show, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, premiered on October 28, 2018. It received an initial order of 32 episodes. Patriot Act explores the modern cultural, political and economic landscape. When writing episodes about the show, Minhaj frequently excluded or limited the role that researchers played in developing content and could be dismissive of fact checkers. Multiple female producers complained of abuse, mistreatment and harassment while on the set, and threatened legal action, which was ultimately settled out of court. In April 2019, Minhaj was listed among TIME's 100 most influential people in the world, and won his second Peabody Award for Patriot Act. Some months after Minhaj's episode on the student loan crisis aired, he was called to testify regarding the issue before the US Congress in September 2019. In August 2020, Minhaj announced the series would not be renewed after 40 episodes. On November 27, 2018, Comedy Central aired a special titled Goatface, featuring Minhaj, Fahim Anwar, Asif Ali and Aristotle Athari. In February 2019, Minhaj played on the "Away" roster during the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game at the Bojangles' Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In September 2019, he testified during a U.S. House Committee on Financial Services hearing on student loan debt.
On November 13, 2020, it was announced that Minhaj would join season two of the Apple TV+ drama The Morning Show in a recurring role. In 2021–2022, Minhaj performed a comedy tour across the United States that culminated in the release of a Netflix special The King's Jester in October 2022. In 2022, Minhaj voiced The Riddler in the first Warner Bros.–Spotify Batman podcast, Batman Unburied. He is scheduled to reprise the role in the 2023 podcast The Riddler: Secrets in the Dark.
On October 30, 2022, Minhaj appeared as a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy!, where his animated and over-the-top reactions earned him the dubious accolade "most annoying contestant ever" by the show's longtime fans.
In February 2023, Minhaj returned to The Daily Show to host it. He was among many prominent individuals to serve short stints hosting the show upon the departure of host Trevor Noah. Other hosts include Wanda Sykes, Jordan Klepper, Roy Wood Jr., John Leguizamo and Al Franken. In March 2023, Minhaj hosted the 38th Independent Spirit Awards. The same year, he had a supporting role in the Jennifer Lawrence comedy film No Hard Feelings.
In July 2024, Minhaj launched his own political talk show and podcast, Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know. In the first episode, he interviewed Senator Elizabeth Warren, and has since interviewed Stacey Abrams and Senator Bernie Sanders.
In October 2024, Minhaj released his third standup comedy special on Netflix, Off With His Head. In the special, he rebukes criticism from The New Yorker, describing the scandal as "dorky".
In the September 2023 issue of The New Yorker, Minhaj was shown to have presented fabricated stories as truth to heighten the experience of racism in immigrant communities. The article was listed as one of the top twenty-five New Yorker articles for the year 2023. Bill Maher likened it to the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax. Examples of fabrication included an anthrax threat letter that spilled onto his daughter and a fabricated account of an FBI informant infiltrating his mosque. According to an interview titled 'Forever (530)', the Greenwich based comedian recalls how the FBI incident, occurring in 2002, climaxed in Minhaj being thrown against a cop car where "he landed his first joke in the parking lot of a gym in Davis." His Netflix special would air fifteen years after his first joke. In reality, the arrest had zero police records matching the incident, and was instead inspired by "getting pushed by an older man during a basketball game as a kid." Regarding the anthrax story, his wife, a UCLA graduated doctor, helped write the serious line of the story "Oh, if you do that again [put our kids in danger], I will leave you in a second." After Homecoming King's release, critics (unaware of the underlying distortions in Minhaj's spoken life narrative), were drawn to Minhaj's real life experiences: "It’s a winning formula that feels right for our times, because it is so clearly genuine."
Minhaj responded in October 2023 via YouTube, providing text messages and audio interviews that mostly agreed with the New Yorker article, or ignored larger points altogether. The video was released on Oct 26th, weeks after the Gaza war began. Minhaj, an actor who worked years before to combat Islamophobia online, started the video by saying "I know the news coming out of the Middle East now, feels devastating" before shifting into a 21-minute video essay defending his previous actions in the comedic space. He defended his storytelling as 'emotional truths' to highlight broader societal issues. In his video's response, Minhaj said The New Yorker article "was so needlessly misleading, not just about my stand-up, but also me as a person. The truth is, racism, FBI surveillance, and threats to my family happened, and I said this on the record." Critics argue that such embellishments risk undermining trust in his narrative and blurring the line between storytelling and deception.
Minhaj has said his comedy influences include Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Trevor Noah, Junot Diaz, Jon Stewart, Chris Rock and Stephen Colbert.
Minhaj is a Muslim with liberal Islamic beliefs and considers himself "non-dogmatic."
In January 2015, Minhaj married his longtime partner Beena Patel, whom he met in college. Patel received a Doctor of Public Health in 2013, and has since worked with homeless patients and is a management consultant for MedAmerica. According to Minhaj in his comedy special, The King's Jester, he and his wife dated for ten years before he proposed to her. Minhaj and Patel are both second-generation Indian Americans; she is a Hindu of Gujarati descent, and he is a Muslim of Uttar Pradeshi descent, something he discussed in his comedy special Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King.
Minhaj and Patel lived in New York City until the pandemic, but have since moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. They have a daughter (born April 2018) and a son (born February 2020).
Minhaj has spoken about his and his wife's struggle to conceive. After his wife convinced him to go to a fertility clinic, it was determined the issue was with his fertility rather than hers. Minhaj underwent a varicocele repair procedure, after discovering there was too much blood in his scrotum. The couple was able to have two children.
In addition to English, Minhaj is fluent in both major registers (Hindi and Urdu) of the Hindustani language. He is a fan of the Sacramento Kings, having grown up nearby. His son had a Kings-themed first birthday party, and he has considered becoming part-owner of the team. In October 2023, he criticized Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip and called for a ceasefire.