We watched Hasan Minhaj’s new Netflix special, THE KING’S JESTER, this weekend; spoilers follow.
It makes for an interesting contrast with HOMECOMING KING. The overall structure is similar, an arc punctuated by digressions, and Minhaj is still very deft at circling the digressions back to the main arc in unexpected ways, usually embroidered with some kind of emotional whiplash. The engine for the overall arc in HOMECOMING KING is revenge on the girl who’d treated him so badly in high school; the engine in THE KING’S JESTER is the fame and recognition he gets from dunking on people like Jared Kushner, MBS, and Narendra Modi; in both cases the presentation makes it clear that it’s a flaw in his character that moves him in this way, and there’s some appreciation of the complexity in each case, that these impulses drive both great accomplishments and acts of dumbness and self-regard that hurt others.
But in THE KING’S JESTER his wife, Beena, provides sort of a Greek chorus, constantly reminding him and the audience of the cost of his actions. And in the end she and their children provide the resolution. After someone throws what turns out not to be anthrax at their daughter, Beena threatens the marriage if Minhaj continues to endanger their family, and Minhaj ends up sort of triumphantly chastened, declaring that he knows where “his line” is: He’ll take the joke as far as it can go until it hurts his family.
And this… kind of flattens the whole thing? There’s the trope of the woman as moderating influence on a genius man’s self-destructive impulses, which — it’s not awesome, it’s probably also fairly real in context, we can probably agree that #BeenaDeservesBetter but it’s also not her show. But the family also serves as spackle over the big hole in this resolution, which is: Minhaj manages by dint of fast talk, charisma, and genuinely hilarious humor to paint “I’m going easier on dictators and criminals so my loved ones don’t get killed” as an act of personal growth, when it is in fact an unbelievably grim concession to the state of the connected world.
The more I think about this, the more bizarre it gets, and maybe that’s a sign that my thinking : watching ratio is off. And you can find ways to paper over it if you look. Maybe Minhaj is perfectly aware of this fact — he’s obviously cognizant that the people he’s antagonizing are, in fact, horrible — and he just didn’t state it to my arbitrary standards of satisfaction; maybe he’s just attending to the balance of dark and light material, which is tricky in an act where he’s trying to hit a range of emotions and use comedy to say something real about something important.
But what makes me think that this runs a little deeper is the fact that the whole arc supports the personal-growth framing of what is, again, a move principally motivated by some deeply scary shit that should never happen to anyone. He talks earlier in the show about his personal reasons for doing something like PATRIOT ACT, and they’re come by honestly — the trauma and frustration of growing up brown in the peri-9/11 USA. That’s real! But when he talks about his viral moments, the emphasis is all on his own dopamine rush; he becomes a bug-eyed, lascivious caricature of himself, caressing an imaginary phone and gathering armfuls of likes to his chest. He calls himself out via Beena, and she’s the sharp-eyed audience surrogate once again: “It’s so interesting how you only care about these issues when there’s a camera on you.” He’s skewering himself, and we’re on board with it, because of course we like people who know their own flaws, who don’t take themselves seriously…
… and we like it so much, we forget that he is roasting himself for the narcissistic act of publicly calling out dictators and murderers. We’re watching him invalidate himself for speaking truth to bloody-handed power.
And there is just no acknowledgment of this. No nod, even, to the idea that it might be unfortunate that Internet mobs can silence a person by threatening their family; he treats the threat of random violence as an impersonal force of nature, some kind of autonomic social response to jokes that go “too far,” where “too far” is somehow something he’s able to assess in advance with high precision. He’s putting family first, achievement unlocked, curtain.
I don’t really know what to do with all this. But it’s hard not to set it against HOMECOMING KING, which (to my memory anyway) was more content to leave awkward and difficult matters unsettled.
After we’d finished THE KING’S JESTER, Shin-Yi mentioned that this show felt less true than HOMECOMING KING, but she wasn’t sure why. My gloss at the time was that HOMECOMING KING was about person problems and THE KING’S JESTER was about celebrity problems. But I think maybe this weird looking-away might be the reason.
Currently listening: OUR OPINIONS ARE CORRECT #117, “What Makes a Story Feel ‘Fast’ Or ‘Slow’?”, by Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz
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