You can’t accuse Hasan Minhaj of not packing enough into The King’s Jester, his first Netflix special for five years. Material that others might stretch to fill a whole show (the struggle to have a baby; his experiences as a celebrity satirist) is crammed into a substantial hour about family, fame and the consequences of campaigning comedy. My unease with the show may be partly cultural. It’s brash, Minhaj’s self-mockery feels like a smokescreen for self-regard and the sentimental conclusions are packaged too neatly for me – but not for Minhaj’s US crowd, who cheer the schmaltzy moments to the rafters.
I feel ungrateful pushing back against a show that’s this accomplished. Too accomplished, perhaps – there’s something clinical about how finely wrought every individual part is: the moment of sincerity, the tightening spotlight, the pause – then the punchline. With these tools, our slick and animated host tells us tales of fertility treatment and new parenthood (featuring a choice joke about adopting a white baby), then of an incident from his youth, when he was targeted by the authorities as a young Muslim in post-9/11 America. Scroll forward, and grownup Minhaj is hosting his own satirical show on Netflix, which was famously pulled from Saudi Arabian broadcast – and Minhaj gives full account here of his compulsion to rile the corrupt and powerful.
Which can feel a bit humblebraggy. Ostensibly, these sections send up Minhaj’s ego and recklessness, as he trolls Jared Kushner and the “vulture capitalism” pioneer Randall Smith. But add a whooping crowd and Minhaj’s bombastic delivery, and the jokes about his spiralling fame (“I am trending No 1 again!”) start to feel like boasting. I felt uncomfortable, too, about how his wife Beena is characterised, as forever nagging him to be less bold, and about how the story of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder becomes all about Minhaj.
But at least, in this meaty hour, delivered with major brio, consequential subjects such as Khashoggi’s killing, the venality of “strategic acquisitions” and (of all things) “the jurisprudence of jokes” are addressed – even if they all must tuck in neatly beneath the perfectly traced learning arc of Hasan Minhaj.
Hasan Minhaj: The King’s Jester is on Netflix.
