Hasan 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.

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".

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?"

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 read the full interview, get your copy of GQ India's February 2018 issue, out on stands now

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