To Tell the Truth...

Happy Halloween. Boo, I guess.

We’re going to be talking about a recent story in the New York Times on the standup comic Hasan Minhaj. It’s not clear if The Times understood this, but the issue at hand goes to the very root of comedy.

If you haven’t the time, or access to The Times online, I’ll summarize the saliencies:

In this story, Minhaj is responding to an article in The New Yorker that accused him of embellishing some anecdotes he’d presented as true in standup routines. These are anecdotes exploring the often heartbreaking travails of Muslims in the United States. When confronted, Minhaj admitted to imprecisions, but said that he considered his job as a “storytelling comedian” differently: “I assumed that the lines between truth and fiction were allowed to be a bit more blurry.”

Are they? Should they be?

Here are three of the things Minhaj embellished. Italicized sections are from The Times story:

On the night of his high-school prom, Minhaj said, his date’s mother told him on her doorstep that she did not want extended family “in Nebraska” seeing photos of her daughter, who was white, beside him. . .He was turned away.

The truth is that there was no doorstep confrontation. His date turned him down on her own two days before the prom. Minhaj now claims the mother had said that thing to him earlier. He says he created the doorstep scene “to drop the audience into the feeling of that moment.”

In another routine, he said he once opened a letter filled with white powder that fell on his daughter. In his telling, he and his wife took their daughter to the hospital and discovered after hours in the waiting room that the powder was not anthrax, as they had feared.

Minhaj admitted that he did not take his daughter to a hospital. He said that she was “nearby” when he opened an envelope with white powder, explaining that the fabrication was meant to highlight the “shock and fear” that he and his wife felt that day.

And finally, Minhaj said he fell victim to the U.S. government’s spying on Muslim communities in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He told an audience that when he was a teenager, an F.B.I. informant slammed him against a cop car while trying to entrap him at the gym. In reality, Minhaj acknowledged his story was based on his being “physically harassed,” while playing basketball, by people whom he suspected were undercover agents.

His explanation: “I wanted to recreate that feeling — that only Muslims felt — for a broad audience, the feeling of paranoia and vindication, tension and release,” Minhaj said of the embellishment, adding, “That was my artistic intent.”

So. Is this a cut-and-dried issue? In today’s questions, a reader asks me if I would still feel admiration for John Mulaney and the prank he played as an adolescent, which I linked to in the Weekend Gene Pool — if it turned out he had completely made it up. It’s a fair question, and the quick answer is that I’d be shocked and disappointed, but I probably wouldn’t jettison him from the list of comics I admire. I think it is reasonable to see some leeway in humor, which sometimes traffics in exaggeration. David Sedaris has admitted to making stuff up.

When I edited Tony Kornheiser’s humor column, he had I had this debate a few times; we tended to disagree, sometimes strongly. Tony would occasionally invent or embellish funny conversations he’d had, particularly with his family. I didn’t love it when he did it. He defended it as trivial misdirection that hurt no one and that goosed the humor of an already funny, and true, situation — that it was a service to the reader. Tony is an honorable man whom I liked and continue to like. We never quite came to agreement on this issue. In short, it’s complicated.

So, with that as background, today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.

Have you taken the polls yet? Please do. Because in a second, I am going to deconstruct this as I see it, and I don’t want to influence votes.

But first, one additional unrelated, poll question, to which I was alerted by a Reader. He read it on the Twitter feed of one Lucas A. Meyer.

Okay, here is my reconstruction, which I will first summarize briefly, from an academic, hermeneutic, semiotic standpoint:

Fuck Hasan Minhaj.

Elaboration:

He is not just a standup comic, he is a social critic and an advocate for Muslims. He wants to change people’s opinions. Nothing wrong with any of that. But his duty to the truth — the literal truth — is far greater in that role, because he is passionately trying to persuade people to feel a certain way. He cannot mess with the facts to make them more dramatic or evoke more sympathy. That makes him simply a liar and a con man.

These are not incidental factual manipulations. Saying he was roughed up by a cop is not remotely the same as being harassed on a basketball court by people he thought might have been cops.

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We need your thoughts and observations and questions, so I can answer them in real time. Please send them to this pretty orange button.

On the broader question: Should a comedian ever lie when relating an anecdote he claims to be true? I am a hard-ass on this subject. My answer is “never in a material way.” Make up an anecdote whole cloth? No way. Change a detail to change the nature of the story ? No way. Invent dialogue that did not happen? No way.

Why? Because the philosophical, ontological and epistemological center of humor is that life is tragic and one way to cope with that terrifying fact is through humor.

We are talking about actual life. We live in a world of irony, illogic, pretension, cruelty, ignorance, self-righteousness, grandiosity, greed, jealousy, hypocrisy, pompousness, savagery, schadenfreude, etc. It tames our terrors to poke fun at these real things. It’s not nearly as funny if you are reduced to inventing stuff to poke fun at, when you are claiming they are true. It undermines your message and, most important, it betrays the trust of readers and audiences, who are given every reason to believe that what you are saying happened, and thus is a valid insight into the absurd nature of life.

(Obviously, I have no problem with parody and satire and comedic novels. These do not claim objective truths. They claim subjective truths and metaphorical truths. One of my favorite novels is Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, which skewers the press. It’s hilarious because it reaches insight through satire. Evelyn’s wife name, by the way, was Evelyn. Now that’s funny only because it is true. )

It would be fair to ask if, over 40 years, I have ever messed with the truth in a humor column. I just thought about this a lot, and the answer is yes, but only in four sorts of circumstances — all of them, in my view, explicable, defensible, and trivial:

Time frames: I have slightly changed the order in which things occurred, to make the storyline a little clearer, and only if it doesn’t change the truth of the narrative in any meaningful way.

My thinking: My thoughts and analysis, as I was experiencing things, sometimes didn’t occur to me until afterwards, in retrospect. I sometimes presented it as having happened in real time. Who gives a shit?

Unimportant details: I have a bad memory. Sometimes, if a fact is insignificant, and I can’t recall some minor detail of it, I have invented one, so as not to destroy the flow of an anecdote or inject some boring qualifier about something inessential. Example: If I recall as an aside that someone used some inappropriate household object to pick his ear, but couldn’t remember what it was, I might settle on what I think it probably was … say, a Bic pen. I would not have said, say, a rectal thermometer because that would have been a baldfaced lie in pursuit of a laugh. That I would have remembered.

Interviews: When a column is essentially me interviewing another person, I see it as a humor collaboration between the two of us, in which I act as participant and editor. Many times, in writing it up afterwards, I will realize either or both of us should have said something a little different from, and funnier than, what we said. In such cases, I would call the interview subject and make sure they have no problem with the change. I did this from time to time, and can’t recall a single instance when the subject objected. As I recall, it happened with this column, one of my favorites, an interview with a very funny big-shot lawyer named Reid Weingarten. I suggested the last line, and he loved it and said yes.

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Just a word on our new Speaker of the House, elected unanimously by the House Republican caucus, including its allegedly “moderate” members, mostly on the sophisticated political theory that We Have to End This Embarrassing Shit Show Now.

The new Speaker is unspeakable. The alleged “moderates” sold their souls and will roast in Hell for all eternity. They’ll be naked, so it will blister.

Just to recap, very briefly, Mike Johnson, he of the generic name, is not generic in his beliefs. He is way outside the mainstream — so far right that he fell off the edge of the flat Earth he might well as well believe in. He is a captive of the gun-nuts. He thinks gay people are sickos. He opposes the legalization of marijuana, even medical marijuana, which he calls a “gateway drug.” He’s an election denier. He’s in the pocket of the pharmaceuticals industry and the oil and gas industry. . He wants a nationwide ban on abortions, saying that would help shore up Medicare and Social Security by funneling more “able-bodied workers into the economy.” He’s opposed to transgender care for children. He wants prayer in public schools. He wants to gut Medicare, Medicaid and defund Planned Parenthood. He thinks the Bible is more important than the Constitution.

What decency might remain in this guy? Maybe some extreme Biblical version of compassion? He does describe himself as an ardent Christian. But, in case you missed it, when asked last week about what he and his caucus might do about the horror in Maine, he reached down into his desiccated, sulfurous soul and this is what he came up with.

Yep, apparently no one has told him that the “hopes and prayers” copout to avoid considering even paltry gun control after a massacre has been emblematic of the most craven political cowards in America. I have created a poem just for Mr. Generica:

Johnson’s GOP

“Hopes and prayers”?
No one cares.
No one dares!
We must obey
The NRA.

And finally, on a lighter note, a video of the most brilliant cat in the world.

So here comes the renowned real-time questions / observations part of the Gene Pool, and answers thereto. REMINDER: If you are reading this in real time, keep refreshing your screen to see more Q’s and O’s. Many of today’s offerings relate to my call this weekend for great pranks and practical jokes you know about, or participated in, or can imagine.

Also, if you enjoy all this and have a spare $4 a month, we’d be wretchedly grateful for the gift. The process takes less than 90 seconds. You do it here:

Q: Here is a prank a friend of mine arranged as he arrived at Cornell as a freshman in 1961. The university would send all the freshmen questionnaires and one of the questions was "What is your religion?” My friend then got with a group of fellow freshmen to answer the question with "Druid". A week later, the university sent a notice to the freshmen saying that a number of Druids had enrolled at Cornell and would there be any interest in space for religious services?

A: This is very nice.

Q: Once upon a time, you mentioned how you could never tell the words "epistemology" (the study of what it means to know) from "ontology" (the study of what it means to exist). I have no problem distinguishing between these words, but only because of a stupid joke I heard several years ago, which I will relay to you now: "I went to see a gastro-ontologist last week. He told me my stomach exists."

A:  Also hermeneutics and semiotics, all four of which I have used incorrectly in the introduction above. It’s all just a mass of silly academic gibberish to me. I have written about it.   But you have, indeed, forever tweezed apart two of the four for me, which is a help. Thank you.

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this right now, on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “To Tell the Truth … “ ) for the full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post from about noon to roughly 1 p.m. ET today.

Again, the pretty orange button for questions and observations:

Q:  If you're going to go with Cornell pranks, the top one has to be from 1997 when someone put a pumpkin on the top of the 173-foot clock tower. 

A:  This is, indeed, an amazing prank.  It was not just that it was 173 feet, it was that it was 173 feet in the air, on top of an unscalable spire.  Can anyone out there suggest how it was done?

Q: We would draw just one name among immediate family to give a Christmas gift to, and I drew my SIL 2 years in a row. I knew she hadn’t used the Fry Daddy I gave her the previous year, so I snuck it out of their apartment, re-wrapped and gave it to her again. It still was bound with staples!

A: I once gave my (then) father-in-law a metal-detector for Christmas.  He was kinda funny offended, because he thought I was implying he was the kind of old retired fart who would use it to beach comb for coins.  (He was indeed retired in Florida.)  He gave it back to me.   

Yes, of course I re-gifted it to him, and he wordlessly gave it back, for the next three Christmases.  He had a good sense of humor.

Q: It occurs to me that somebody is the world’s greatest masturbator, and no one will ever know. Not even them. Although I imagine they have some idea.

A: Thank you for sharing this important observation.

Q: Now that I’m an adult, I have regrets about this one. In middle school, the combination for the locker I’d been assigned the first year still worked in the second. It had never been reassigned and was vacant. So throughout the year my friends and I would put the remains of our perishable lunches in it: tuna sandwiches, yogurt and milk cartons, and other things prone to give olfactory offense in time. By spring it could be smelled from across the hall. We were never caught.

A:  I am not sure why you have regrets.  It seems like the perfect adolescent prank. 

Q: Have you left Little Twittler’s Nazi Bar & Grill site yet, and have you retired from social media, or just haven’t figured out which aspiring fascist’s site to try next? 

A: I am off Twitter, but not because it has turned Nazi, though it has. Ordinarily, I’d stay and fight in La Resistance.  I am off Twitter because their management are jackasses.   One day I had to kill my cookies, and Twitter no longer recognized me. But to get back on, I had to have two-step verification, and I had not signed up for it.  Six weeks of trying to get this resolved went nowhere because, having fired its entire customer service staff, Twitter doesn’t give a crap about our problems, especially (this is a guess) when the complainant – a former blue check – has refused to pay their damn $8 a month AND is a flaming liberal.  So to hell with them.  

Q: A humorist of your stature is probably aware of Edwardian prankster Horace de Vere Cole, most famous for dressing as an Abyssinian prince and, with a group of his friends (including Virginia Woolf), talking his way into an official tour of a Royal Navy warship (sort of an antediluvian Borat, if you will).

My favorite has to be his running joke of hiding a cow udder in his pants with a teat hanging out of the fly and going for a walk on the town. When alerted to his perceived situation, he would pull out a pair of scissors and cut it off. (Despite all this, he may have been outshone by his sister, who pulled off the legendary prank of marrying Neville Chamberlain.)

A: I definitely knew about Horace. He and Virginia kept saying “bunga bunga” to each other, as I recall. (A less wonderful part of this prank is that they wore shoe-polish brownface.)

I didn’t know about the cow udder part, especially the scissoring, and I am laughing aloud as I type these words.

Q: As far as tasteless themes: Young foreign service officer goes to dinner in the country he’s serving, and catches the eye of a local female attaché. One thing later, and another, and they have sex, she moans, for purposes here, “Yaka-mori, yaka-mori.”  He thinks it must mean “it’s great it’s great!” And he does it more vigorously. 

Next day on the golf course with her boss, the ambassador,  hits a hole in one! The officer doesn’t have his language and wants to say, “ it’s great!” So he tries, “Yaka-mori! The ambassador turns and says, “what you mean, wrong hole?!”

A: This is a terrible joke that only a 14-year-old boy would think makes any sense at all.  Thank you. 

Q:  I went to Cornell and never heard this prank story that you told on the weekend, taken from a book on practical jokes.   Also Cornell doesn’t get its water from Beebe Lake. It’s not that big a lake. Internet says it comes from Fall Creek.

A: Yeah, my daughter had never heard of it either.  She went to veterinary school there.  But the basic story is true, confirmed by the daughter of the man who accompanied Hugh Troy on the mission. They did create rhinoceros tracks in the snow.  And there was an academic hubbub over it.  

The part that is unconfirmed is the hole in the ice.   The daughter says her dad never told her about that. 

I believe Beebe Lake did at one time contribute to the school’s water supply.  I have asked experts   in Ithaca to confirm this.  Will report back. 

Hugh Troy died in the early 1960s, so he was still alive when the book came out in 1953, and he gave interviews for it, so if the end of the incident was fabricated, he was a party to the fabrication.  Which would not be too surprising.  The man was a hoaxster.  

Troy was a fanatical prankster.  He sometimes plotted years in advance.  In November 1932 he bought up 10 or 15 newspapers with the front page headline ROOSEVELT ELECTED. He kept them for three years.  And then, one day in 1935, he gave one each to a dozen of his friends, and had them ride the subway, several to a car, each reading a newspaper screaming ROOSEVELT ELECTED.  People had no idea what the hell was going on. 

Q:  When I was a freshman in high school, our elderly mechanical drawing teacher, Mr. Birch, had hearing aids built into the stems of his glasses. The whole class played a practical joke on him, to make him think his hearing aids were broken. He’d ask a question, and the student would reply by just mouthing the words but not saying them out loud. This went on a couple of times, he looked worried and fiddled with his hearing aids, while we students were trying to maintain straight faces. Then someone accidently knocked a ruler on the floor. This was 64 years ago and I still laugh about it.

A: In practical jokes, there is a fine line between hilarity and cruelty.  I think this stayed on the right side of it, if barely. 

Q: I took inspiration from Batman Returns when my new manager insisted I move from a relatively modern office with a window to a windowless one in another building that had not been renovated in over a quarter century. On the whiteboard in my old office, I wrote the phrase “HELLO THERE” to welcome the next occupant. All the letters were written with wet erase marker except the “O” and the “T.” I left the dry eraser and took the cleaning spray with me. I figured someone would wipe the board and reveal the ominous message “HELL HERE” at some point. I never found out if it worked because I tendered my resignation a few weeks later when I received an offer with a competitor.

A: It’s an excellent mechanical version of the original electric one.  It appeals to me.  I also prefer mechanical clocks.

Q: I knew that John Mulaney routine before I even clicked on it.  It is the best he’s ever done. 

A:  No, this is the best he has ever done.    The horse in the hospital. 

Q A True Prank as Remembered by S. Newman

Year: 1967 Location: Kingston, PA (Population about 20,000 - 17 miles south of Scranton) Time: It was a Sunday morning in July around 1:30AM.

The Prankor: My girlfriend, Elaine. (Recent high school graduate heading to college.)

The Prankee: Me (headed to my college Junior year).

The Setting: My girlfriend Elaine and I were in the Top Hat Diner. The oldest and best diner (out of two) in the town where we both grew up. Everyone in the diner either knew me or knew my parents or both. As usual every seat was taken and there was a small line waiting to get in. We had the booth nearest to the door. The cash register was at the other side of the door. Elaine was sitting closer to the door and opposite me. The Prank: We had finished eating and I motioned to Pat, one of my favorite waitresses who I thought of as a friend since she started at the Top Hat in 1961, to bring the check. Just as Pat laid the check on the table and smiled at me, Elaine stood up in the booth and slammed her fist loudly on the table. Everyone in the diner quickly looked in our direction as she shouted, “I won’t have another abortion. That would be my third one!”

She looked very upset, almost near tears, as she ran out of the diner. Pat’s smile was long gone, and the diner was as silent as a tomb as I stood up, left the tip, and walked to the cashier The diner was still quiet with all eyes on me as I paid and walked out the door all the while wearing an angry, disgruntled face. Twenty feet past the diner’s light stood a waiting Elaine in the night’s darkness. We hugged and broke out in laughter. I never did get back at her.

A: This seems to be a really shitty prank. Sorry. On so many levels.

Q: A friend of mine held a party at his parent's house while they were out of town. One of the guests was another friend of mine, a plumber.   During the party the host was informed that there was something wrong with the upstairs toilet. He went to the bathroom and the toilet was gone! He went outside and the toilet was on the front lawn.

A: This reminds me of a favorite bit from the old Candid Camera.  They had a mechanic do something to the car. .   Then they chose a series of service stations that were located at the bottom of hills.   Their street operative, Fannie Flagg (yes, the same Fannie Flagg) would “drive” the car into the service station, and tell the guys that her car was making a funny noise, and could they pop the hood and see if anything was wrong.  The expressions on the faces of the mechanics were priceless, when they saw that the car that had just apparently driven in had no engine.

Q: Former major league pitcher Moe Drabowski was kind of the gold standard of pranksters ( insisting on a wheelchair to take him to first after being hit by a pitch, putting goldfish in the other team’s water cooler). Mostly, though, he put the bullpen ( where he languished throughout his journeyman career) telephone to evil purpose, like ordering pizza—from Hong Kong.. Most famously, he would call the opposing team’s bullpen and imitate the opponent’s manager and tell the coach there to get certain relief pitchers to start warming up.

A: Whenever a cake was presented to a Yankees player in the 1970s, Graig Nettles would strip off all his clothes, and sit on it. 

Q: Do you know if the Rhinoceros prank you told was before or after Ionesco’s play came out? Or, as I suspect, about the same time, which makes the joke even better.

A: It was way before.   In the 1920s or 30s.   “The Rhinoceros” was written, in French, in 1959.  I am sure Ionesco stole the idea from Hugh Troy.   (The Rhinoceros was about the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, though.)

This is Gene, with an aside. I have to say I am sort of shocked, judging from the poll results, about how little you care whether comedians are telling the truth.

Speaking of the poll results, have you all noticed that for the last week or so, even though there are hundreds of responses, the poll specifies that there has been only one? We’re looking into the glitch.

Q: Well, there's this: Were the Fake Trump Signs a Prank? Or a Political Dirty Trick? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/nyregion/fred-camillo-trump-signs-greenwich.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

A:  It was both.  Nothing wrong with that. 

Q:  This really happened. I wish I had been a part of it. 

When I was a freshman in high school we had a brand new teacher who drove a small car, and if I'm remembering correctly, it was something like a Simca. One day, he parked right outside the doors to the auditorium stage. The Seniors in the AV Club, of which I was a member,  recruited about a dozen football players and they picked up the car and carried it onto the stage. The AV guys had to remove the center post between the double doors to get it in. Then they replaced the center post and set up a bunch of spotlights on the car, like a showroom floor. Being the new teacher, he had to monitor a study hall in the auditorium and when his period came around, they waited until everyone settled in, dimmed the house lights and opened the curtain. They let the teacher ruminate for an hour or so AFTER school on how to get it back out, before they offered to remove the center post and let him drive it out. - Tom Logan

A: When I was in the NYU dorms, there was a guy no one liked.  One day they moved all the furniture in his room: bed, dresser, everything – into the elevator.  They packed it like a Tetris cube. 

Q:  My dad was the owner of a small business in a small town. For more than 30 years he worked long hours--usually 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., six days a week. Every work day he took a morning coffee break at the local restaurant across from his store, joining a group of other store owners doing the same. He was a kind man, and a good tipper, but he couldn't resist playing an occasional prank on the waitresses--that's what they were called, of course--who served him every day for years. 

Here's the only prank I remember from my childhood: One day the waitress gave him a refill of his coffee, and before she left the table, he stood up and announced that he was in a hurry and needed to take his coffee to go. He then calmly poured his cup of coffee into the pocket of his jacket and walked out. The waitress almost dropped the coffee pot and his companions sputtered in shock. What I loved about my dad's pranks is that they never hurt anyone. And no one ever saw them coming. [In case it isn't clear, he had prepared for this trick by lining his pocket with a plastic bag.]

A: That’s elegant.  And not hurtful.  The perfect prank. 

Q:  This story was told to me by a friend (SRM). I don't know if it's true and I don't know if his friends copied it from someone else (or if it's a common frat prank). I also try not to use crude language, so my description will be a bit tortured. SRM and his friends (maybe frat mates) at college were having a feud with administration. They first bought a dozen doughnuts. With erections, twelve of them placed a doughnut on each penis and took a photo (neck down). They then cleaned the doughnuts, put them back in the box, then sent the box, along with a note of apology, to the admin. Ninety minutes later, they sent the photo to admin. Who knows, but it's an amusing story. Thanks.

A:  Who knows?  I know.  It is not true.  Snopes investigated it.  It’s an old urban myth, like the burglars with the toothbrush up the butt, and the kidney thefts  and “hit the floor.” 

This is Gene. I am calling us down. Before we go, I want to link one more time to one of the last stories written by my friend Marjorie Williams. She died not long after it was published. It was titled “The Halloween of My Dreams.” And it is one of the finest pieces of writing you will ever read.

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Please keep sending in questions / observations, which I will address on Thursday’s Invitational Gene Pool.

And, should you feel kindly and generous: