Hasan Minhaj was doing pretty well for himself — that is, until a recent New Yorker profile came out. The piece revealed that some of the Daily Show alum’s bits go a bit beyond poetic license. His claim that his family was mailed anthrax? Turns out that didn’t happen. The backlash has been severe, and on Friday Bill Maher joined the chorus of Minhaj dissenters.
On his latest episode of Real Time, Maher began a segment on Minhaj by calling him “the comedian who answers the question, ‘What if Jussie Smollett did stand-up?’”
Maher didn’t ease up, saying “the stories Mr. Minhaj tells in his act to elicit sympathy for himself as a Muslim and a person of color are completely made up.” He added, “If you want to speak truth to power, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you have to include the truth part.”
Thing is, Maher and Minhaj have a checkered history. Maher claimed that “he’s done this before with me,” saying that he once accused him of “saying Muslims should be put in internment camps—something I’ve never come close to thinking, let alone saying.”
Maher then compared him to a figure even more polarizing than Smollett: Donald Trump: “How is that different than this guy?”
You can watch Maher’s Real Time segment in the video above.
(Via The Daily Beast)