Around half past nine on a Thursday evening this past December, at the Comedy Cellar in New York City, Hasan Minhaj is an hour away from taking the stage. By all reckoning, this should be a fine journalistic moment, a moment when the writer is let into the thin, charged space between Minhaj’s private existence and his public one. There must be a revelatory process of preparation, surely, or an instant when, in exchanging one skin for another, the performer’s soul is laid bare. But nothing of the sort transpires. Minhaj vibrates into the Olive Tree Café, just above the Cellar, genially greets everyone he knows – and he knows everyone there – orders a double espresso and slumps into his seat. He’s in streetwear so inconsequential that I forget it instantly. (My notes reveal a grey sweatshirt of some kind, with a hood.) It’s as if his 10 minutes of stand-up are just a scheduled intrusion into an otherwise ordinary weekday evening – the comedian’s version of the phone call from the office, which he has to step out of the bar to take.

And really, that’s what it is, this Thursday: a regular day at work. Minhaj has come to the Cellar after shooting an episode of The Daily Show, which airs five evenings a week, and where he’s a senior correspondent. The Cellar, it’s true, was once the focus of such aspiration for him that he can only describe it in religious terms. Growing up in northern California, “This was the Holy Grail for me. It was a part of all these movies and TV shows, and those portraits you see in the hall – Ray Romano, Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle – who became comedy behemoths, they all worked here.” The Cellar is comedy’s equivalent of a peer-review journal: A stand-up artist needs two Cellar veterans to vouch for them before they can appear. But even upon this patch of hallowed earth, Minhaj must by now have appeared many dozens of times. Then there are the hundreds of sets he’s done in scores of towns around America – places where he sees gun racks on Priuses, and where, in response to Homecoming King, his acutely personal show, he encounters audiences that laugh less but nod more. At 32, Minhaj is already something of a veteran.

Perhaps the right pre-performance moment to have caught him was just before the debut of Homecoming King off Broadway, in October 2015, or before he recorded a version of that show in January 2017 for his first Netflix special. On Netflix, the show was 73 minutes long, and it told the story of a Muslim Indian-American kid and his quest to find his place in American society. Minhaj narrated the immigrant background of his parents, and anecdotes of shame, anger, confusion – and rare, sweet revenge – from his own second-generation life. He poked fond fun at his father’s idiosyncrasies: the seriousness about work, the anxiousness that his children succeed in this country that had been gifted to them. “I have to deliver the dream. I am aware of that,” Minhaj told National Public Radio early last year, about his father’s expectations. “I go back to Aligarh and I go back to Delhi often, where my cousins live now, and I’m very aware of the opportunity that I have when I go meet them. That’s where I understand and I empathise with what my dad feels.” When Homecoming King dropped, it elevated Minhaj into a rarefied realm: that of the comedian who had something serious to say. The New Yorker called the special “a loving arbitration, by a member of the New Brown America, on how to be a son of his country and his parents at once.” In December 2017, Foreign Policy named Minhaj one of its 50 Leading Global Thinkers of 2017; others on the list included Emmanuel Macron, Ai Weiwei and a range of scientists doing frightfully important work.

It’s inescapable that Minhaj is part of a new cohort of comedians who’re all negotiating brownness in their own way: Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, Aparna Nancherla, Mindy Kaling, Hari Kondabolu. It’s also clear how neatly they fit into a uniquely American tradition of speaking about the minority experience – inverting it, challenging it, explaining it, making peace with it – through comedy. Mel Brooks and Rodney Dangerfield threaded their Jewish identity through their craft; Richard Pryor and Chris Rock, their African-American identity. The real risks Minhaj is taking, machete in hand to hack through the thickets of this terrain, have to do not with content but with form. Minhaj wants to be a comedian but also something else, something beyond. He wants to be a storyteller, a performer for whom the laughs are secondary.

The ambition began to brew in 2014, not long after Minhaj joined The Daily Show. “Jon Stewart calls all the correspondents into his office,” Minhaj recalls. “He said: ‘Look, I won’t be renewing my contract. I’ll be leaving the show.’ He said: ‘I’ve manipulated these chess pieces every different way I can.’”

“What do you mean?” Minhaj asked him.

Stewart replied: “I’ve done everything I can from behind a desk: host, play over-the-shoulder graphics, play a clip and then come out of it befuddled or angry, have fake correspondents sit across the desk from me.”

This made Minhaj think: What was he doing to push his art forward?

Minhaj hadn’t always wanted to do comedy; in fact, he didn’t even have cable television at home when he was growing up. The family watched plenty of Bollywood films, though; his parents had moved from Aligarh to America not long before he was born, so India was not very far behind them (at his wedding, to his college sweetheart, Minhaj and his troupe of groomsmen danced to “Saajanji Ghar Aaye” from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai). In school, he joined the debate team; he also kept trying out for the basketball team, but he was cut from the selection every year. He took a job at an Office Max just to earn enough money to buy a pair of Nike shoes branded with the name of his favourite player, Anfernee Hardaway.

When Minhaj was a political science major at the University of California, Davis, he watched Never Scared, a Chris Rock special, and fell in love with comedy.

He started performing at open mics when he was 19, shuttling between gigs in his beat-up Nissan Stanza, and he founded a comedy club on campus. (This was a shrewd move: It was a way to invite big-name comics to perform, and to get to know them well in the process.) After he graduated, Minhaj worked for a while in tech support in Palo Alto but quit very rapidly to bet on himself: touring colleges, starting a web series and finally flying to New York to audition for The Daily Show. It was a natural fit. Minhaj is electrically witty, of course, even in conversation, as he’s expected to be. But he doesn’t so much wisecrack as amplify the exasperation he feels over the state of things around him­ – a quintessential Daily Show quality. “Jokes are catalysts to take you to the truth,” he says. The comedy comes from compassion, from a hope for improvement. Minhaj is, he said in a recent interview, an “angry optimist”.

When Stewart left the show, Minhaj was already shaping the kernel of Homecoming King as a quarter-of-an-hour show for The Moth, a storytelling collective in New York, and he began gradually to fatten this product, strengthening its bones and adding flesh. A colleague told him, “The most interesting things you say to me are the things you say offstage.” It made him realise he was leaving behind some of his best thoughts, some of his most poignant experiences, only because convention had boiled stand-up down to 10 or 15 minutes of patter. “Usually most shows are: ‘Joke-Joke-Joke-Joke-Joke, thank you and good night.’ I had to fundamentally change it.”

Every table at the Olive Tree Café holds a saucer of blackboard chalk, and this has mystified me until Minhaj, at this point, grabs a piece and begins drawing on the table’s slate top. Here’s how a comedian workshops a routine, he says, and he draws a series of rectangles. Some of the jokes don’t work – he crosses two rectangles out – and some do. These he circles. Usually, performers distil the effective jokes into a smaller, tighter set (downward arrows, into a trio of shaded, overlapping circles). But what if he spaces the effective jokes out and fills the gaps with narrative? He draws a line on which the jokes sit at a distance from each other, like a necklace that is missing some of its beads.

The meticulousness of these schematics isn’t ordinary at all. “He’s the first comedian I’ve ever known to storyboard every part of how the joke would be covered,” Roy Wood Jr, Minhaj’s colleague at The Daily Show, tells me. “His attention to detail beyond the jokes is important, and something that most comedians do not pay attention to.”

Homecoming King bloomed out of this soil. It was more This American Life than Saturday Night Live – a careful choreography of pathos and humour, in which even the silences seemed calibrated to the microsecond. Minhaj saw Birdman, admired its unblinking Steadicam and imported it into his show’s second act: one continuous shot, through which he describes a hate crime against his family. He breaks the fourth wall and looks straight into the camera, into the eyes of the viewer on her couch. He projects visuals behind himself, and they form a sophisticated presentation unto themselves.

Minhaj worked through the autumn of 2016 on the format of this special. At which point, America, as if to reward Minhaj for his labours, offered his show a cleaver-keen timeliness by electing Donald Trump president.

At the Comedy Cellar, Minhaj and I watch the two comedians who’re on before him on the evening’s roster. Both mention Trump; indeed, they dwell on him, not so much mining him for laughs as exorcising themselves of the pain he’s causing America at the moment. The first, a black woman, tells of the time she went on a date with an Italian man who supports Trump, and who doesn’t understand why she keeps returning to this fact. “Have you seen my face?” she says she told him. “I have Obama socks on right now!” The second comedian riffs on Trump’s constant prevarication. “He lies like a child!” And here the comedian cowers, looks shiftily at the audience and tosses off both sides of an imagined conversation.

“Did you break that, Donald?”

“No!”

“Well, then, who broke it?”

“Muslims!”

Sitting in the dark, the audience roars in appreciation, like some giant beast wailing out of its cave.

Trump is a gift to comedians: a punchline in himself, a purveyor of such ready absurdities that they don’t even have to be sculpted into jokes. Trump’s America, though, is no laughing matter. It’s racist, harsh and divided­ – ­which makes it, ironically, an ideal home for Minhaj, who doesn’t always want to make us chortle, who wants us often to shift uncomfortably in our seats. Even his patent earnestness, which might otherwise have palled, feels palliative in these cynical times. And he finds himself in the strangest of situations: having built a career explaining to others what America meant to him, he now tries to remind others of what America was meant to be for them.

His first post-Trump engagement was a barnstormer: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last April, which the president refused to attend.

“Look, we were scared shitless in the beginning,” Prashanth Venkataramanujam, Minhaj’s head writer for that set, tells me. Trump in the presidency was still an unknown quantity, and the country was still raw from the election. Reality felt up for grabs. “We knew we wanted to make the speech personal… Hasan’s performance style doesn’t lend itself well to rattling off monologue jokes. I can be honest – whenever he just does straight jokes, it feels stilted. But he has a massive ace in the hole. His… ability to construct a narrative.”

Trump saturates Minhaj’s working life. For The Daily Show, he travels around America for a segment called “Brown In Town”, and like others on the programme, he helps write episodes even if he doesn’t appear in them. But the relentlessness can also be exhausting. “Before the day even starts, man, I try to take some moments for myself,” Minhaj says. “I’m going to make myself some breakfast. I’ll meditate. I’ll take a shower without looking at the phone.” Only after that does he start to wrestle with the day’s events. “And even then, I realise the most important thing is: The jokes aren’t important. What’s the take? What’s the argument that makes sense of the insanity?”

Minhaj wants to keep responding to Trump, and to the state of the world, but he doesn’t plan to use himself as a subject again and again. That can, in the end, prove too constricting. “I know people are like: ‘Tell me more stories about your life and your parents.’ I’m like: ‘I gave you my life story,’” he says. There are other ways to deploy his skills. Ahead of him are a role in the upcoming series Champions, two feature films called The Spy Who Dumped Me and Most Likely To Murder, a sketch comedy special called Goatface on Comedy Central and at least two other projects he can’t yet talk about. It’s clear, though, that he’s thinking about new specials, even if he doesn’t say as much. “Maybe I don’t have to be the protagonist. Maybe it’s someone I meet along the way, and I can lay the runway for them to be the star of the show.” His curiosity about others and his nimbleness of vision are unusual – borrowed, it seems, from a journalist’s playbook rather than a typical comedian’s. Stewart had these qualities as well, and they launched him into a sort of perennial relevance. The world will never stop changing, never stop providing Minhaj with limitless material to mine.

To be a comedian in the age of Trump requires energy, and fortunately Minhaj has a surplus of it. Even now, at 10:40pm at the end of a long day, he’s pacing, bouncing, back-slapping, glad-handing. We’re down in the Cellar now, and I lose sight of him temporarily.

A comedian wraps up – the “Trump lies like a child” guy – and the emcee delivers his own little monologue. Then he announces, “From The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj!” Applause rends the room, and Minhaj bursts out of the darkness from somewhere to my right, lopes down the corridor like a prizefighter en route to the ring and takes the stage.

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