If you’re South Asian, or South Asian American or friends with someone from either demographic, you’ve probably heard about Netflix’s latest addition to the political comedy genre: “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.”
Except “Patriot Act” does not fall into the political comedy genre — not exactly.
Unlike the whole host of late-night political comedy shows audiences are familiar with, including Minhaj’s previous workplace “The Daily Show,” “Patriot Act” tops out at just 20-or-so minutes and is topical. Other shows are longer, following a more traditional format of the host sitting behind a desk and attacking several issues over the course of the show, with celebrity guests dropping by in between.
Minhaj, on the other hand, remains standing throughout the episode and has no guests. Each episode focuses on one issue, and the show’s schtick is to deliver a well-researched, unique take that (more often than not) leaves audiences “shook,” to put it in popular terminology.
For instance, the show’s first episode was titled “Affirmative Action,” in which Minhaj discusses the lawsuit Asian American students filed against Harvard College (which claims the college has a restrictive quota for how many Asian American students it accepts and that this discriminatory practice should end). Minhaj’s monologue, in each episode, is accompanied by large, continuous digital screens behind him and a digital floor beneath him, which display statistics and research to prove and drive home Minhaj’s arguments. According to Minhaj, this visual aspect of the show is quite important: “It’s like an EDM concert, but you’re learning something!”
If someone is wondering why they should watch the show when so many others exist — especially fan favorites like “The Daily Show” with current host Trevor Noah or “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” — there are several reasons.
For one, the information you are getting is not the same.
It cannot be stressed enough that political comedy shows are nowhere near synonymous with the news. If one must read multiple newspapers to understand the issue better, one almost definitely needs to expand their political comedy sources. Minhaj — and this is also why all your South Asian friends, specifically South Asian Muslims, are obsessed with him — is a brown, Muslim man who actually acknowledges and gives importance to those parts of his identity. His perspective — the “brown melanin” perspective, as he phrases it — is not represented anywhere on late night television or online streaming sites like Netflix, Amazon or Hulu. Additionally, it is a perspective that is often erased or overlooked in a post-9/11 world, which makes it almost a social responsibility to watch “Patriot Act,” if one strives to be intersectional.
The writing for “Patriot Act” is also distinctive as Minhaj makes a conscious effort not to name President Trump; “I know he exists, but I just don’t want to give him the attention,” Minhaj says, as a way to comment on how much news is dominated by the resident and that as a result, plenty of other important issues are forgotten.
The show is a weekly series, with an episode coming out each Sunday. According to Minhaj during his interview on Stephen Colbert’s show, the show has 32 episodes in total lined up for now but has released seven episodes, discussing, for example, US-Saudi Arabia relations, content moderation and free speech in the digital age and immigration enforcement in their first cycle. The series returns in 2019.
