On Monday’s (September 18th) episode of The View, Whoopi Goldberg commented on the controversy surrounding Homecoming King star Hasan Minhaj after he revealed that his stand-up comedy is embellished.
“That’s what we do” [as comedians], Goldberg said. “That’s what we do, we tell stories and we embellish them.”
She added, “If you’re going to hold a comic to the point where you’re going to check up on stories, you have to understand, a lot of it is not the exact thing that happened because why would we tell exactly what happened? It’s not that interesting. There’s information that we will give you as comics that will have grains of truth, but don’t take it to the bank. That’s our job, a seed of truth: sometimes truth and sometimes total B.S.”
This comes after the No Hard Feelings actor told The New Yorker that his jokes were based on “emotional truth,” and that “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”
“All my standup stories are based on events that happened to me,” Minhaj said in a statement to Deadline. “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. You wouldn’t go to a Haunted House and say ‘Why are these people lying to me?’—The point is the ride. Standup is the same.”
