Hasan Minhaj Reveals He Lost ‘Daily Show’ Job After Admitting He Fabricated Stories About Being Persecuted For Being Muslim

Comedian Hasan Minhaj confirmed his joke scandal from 2023 cost him the job of hosting Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. 

Minaj recalled the significant backlash he received from his infamous 2023 New Yorker profile in a new cover story with Esquire magazine.

“We were in talks, and I had the gig, and we were pretty much good to go,” he said. “It went away – that’s part of showbiz.”

When a New Yorker profile on Minhaj was published in September 2003, one of his standup quotes ignited huge debate among critics: “My comedy Arnold Palmer is 70% emotional truth – this happened – and then 30% hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.”

This comment caused people to question the sincerity of various of his jokes and stories and posed the moral question of how much creative license artists (in all different forms) should be allowed to take in their work.

In the piece, he admitted that he had fabricated stories about being socially snubbed due to being a Muslim. 

Of the backlash he received, Minhaj said, it “was painful, there’s no doubt about it. It was the first time I saw the speed and velocity of the Internet and how quickly a story can take off. That part of it was very new to me and disorienting.”

Minhaj originally responded to The New Yorker article: “I use the tools of standup comedy – hyperbole, changing names and locations, and compressing timelines to tell entertaining stories. That’s inherent to the art form.”

In a video shared in October 2023, Minhaj said that the magazine’s profile on him (though he did not mention the writer by name) had a multitude of “omissions and factual errors” that “misrepresented my life story.” He proceeded to differentiate between his political comedy and his storytelling comedy. He explained he “was under the impression that in storytelling, the lines between truth and fiction were allowed to be a bit more blurry.”