Whoopi Goldberg has come to Hasan Minhaj’s defense after claims that some of his stand-up jokes are embellished.
On during segment View On Monday, Goldberg and her fellow co-hosts took a moment to discuss Minhaj and exaggerate the things that have occasionally happened to him as a joke.
“That’s what we do,” Goldberg said of the comedians’ role. “That’s what we do. We tell stories and decorate them.’
Goldberg then recalled the time a reporter called to fact-check one of her stand-ups in which she said she had a degree from New York University. She told the reporter she didn’t have a college degree and never said she did until she realized he was talking about one of her character characters, Fontaine.
“If you’re going to take a comic to the point where you’re controlling their stories,” she continued, “you have to understand that a lot of it isn’t exactly what happened, because why should we say what exactly happened? It’s not that interesting.”
Towards the end of the segment on Minhaj, Goldberg doubled down, explaining that a lot of the things comics joke about have a grain of truth, but they don’t need to be taken so seriously. “That’s our job,” the co-host concluded, “a seed of truth, sometimes true and sometimes complete BS.”
The segment followed a story published in The New Yorker it found that parts of Minhaj’s on-stage anecdotes were apparently false and could not be verified, prompting the comedian to issue a statement.
“All my standup stories are based on things that happened to me,” he said The Hollywood Reporter. “I use the tools of standup comedy – hyperbole, name and place changes, and timeline compression – to tell funny stories.”
He continued: “It is inherent in the art form. You wouldn’t go to a haunted house and say ‘Why are these people lying to me?’ — The bottom line is the ride. Standup is the same.”
