Stand-up comedian/actor Hasan Minhaj sits down with three friends—Poorna Jagannathan, Asif Ali, and Saagar Shaikh—to talk about their new Hulu show, Deli Boys, iconic moments in Brown Cinema, and what it was like to face off against one of the most intimidating villains in television history: Tan France.
Deli Boys: When their convenience store-magnate father suddenly dies, a pair of pampered Pakistani American brothers lose everything and are forced to reckon with their Baba’s secret life of crime as they attempt to take up his mantle in the underworld.
Hasan Minhaj: Minhaj was born in Davis — a Northern California city near Sacramento — to Indian Muslim immigrant parents. He stayed local for college, graduating with a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis in 2007. Around the same time, he began performing standup in San Francisco, and relocated to Los Angeles in 2009 for NBC’s Stand-up for Diversity. He appeared on MTV’s hidden camera show Disaster Date before hosting the network’s short-lived series Failosophy, with other TV gigs including State of Georgia, Arrested Development and Getting On.
The rising comedian was hired as a correspondent on The Daily Show, then hosted by Stewart, in 2014. Minhaj landed the role after an audition tape sketch in which he skewered a recent debate about Islam between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck, and became popular as a correspondent alongside the likes of Samantha Bee, Jordan Klepper and Jessica Williams in large part because of his sharp cultural commentary on Muslim and Asian American issues.
Minhaj’s profile was further elevated when he was tapped as the featured performer at the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner. “Only in America can a first-generation, Indian American Muslim kid get on the stage and make fun of the president,” Minhaj said of Donald Trump, whom he labeled the “liar in chief.”
In 2015, he premiered his one-man off-Broadway show Homecoming King, heavily based on the eccentricities of growing up second-generation Indian Muslim in America, which he later evolved into a 2017 Netflix special of the same name. Minhaj left The Daily Show in 2018 when he scored his own political satire series on Netflix, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, which aired 40 episodes before it was canceled in 2020.
