Hasan Minhaj got a 1310 on his SATs. While this may seem like an arbitrary introduction to the 34-year-old host of Netflix’s Patriot Act, one designed to make him cringe—it is—it’s also one of the most salient points about him. First of all, he brings it up all the time. He brought it up when he was a correspondent for The Daily Show. He brought it up in his Peabody Award-winning stand-up special, Homecoming King (“not good for an Indian kid!”). He brought it up on the inaugural episode of Patriot Act, a show that received an unprecedented 32-episode order before it aired. He’s in on the self-infantilizing nature of the joke, of the ridiculousness of holding on to suburban disappointments, but therein lies the core of Hasan Minhaj. “When I was developing Homecoming King, we had some really heated conversations where my cocreator was like, ‘Dude, come on, your first love didn’t want to go to prom with you. Your spine isn’t getting shattered in the back of a police car.’ But I pushed back. Why does the collateral damage always have to be death in order for the story to be valid? Why does our story have to be steeped in poverty porn in order for it to matter?”

He continues on what’s clearly a familiar path, widening his eyes, which are already fairly puppy-dog, even when he’s not being sarcastic.

“ ‘Oh, my name’s Hasan Minhaj, I grew up in the gullies of Mumbai and never thought I’d make it to America!’ ” he mocks. “Like, we can’t get Lena Dunham freedom? We can’t just say ‘Dating’s hard’? ”

We are standing in front of a 10-foot inflatable red lota (“This is the O.G. bidet,” Minhaj explains. “We’ve been on butt hygiene for a minute”) that reads “SHIT HAPPENS!” It’s the opening day of artist Maria Qamar’s first solo exhibition on the Lower East Side. Qamar, a Pakistani Canadian artist (aka @hatecopy), came to Minhaj’s attention via “brown Twitter,” he says; Mindy Kaling has featured her work on sets as well as on a personal holiday card. Much of Qamar’s art is inspired by Indian soap opera heroines, and the effect is that of a subversive Lichtenstein. It’s easy to see why Minhaj feels a kinship. While you’re busy appreciating how stylish it is, the political soul of it comes straight for you. In one painting, a woman slaps Trump across the face as he shouts “Bidaai!” which means “Fix yourself!” more or less.

“What I like most about her work is that it puts brown female leads front and center. She just goes for it,” says Minhaj. “There’s a lot of brown dudes out there right now—we’re taking up a lot of space.”

He has a point, albeit one that somewhat undermines his previous point. With increased representation comes diverse preoccupations. One thing you can say about, say, Aziz Ansari (who opened his latest special with a good-natured Minhaj name-drop) is, that guy has made a career out of “Dating’s hard.” But the expectations for Minhaj are different. He started as a stand-up, but broke out as a satirist on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, doing segments on the Muslim ban and equal pay in women’s soccer. To seal the deal, he played the notoriously tough ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2017, months after Trump took office. “Nobody wanted it,” says Minhaj of the job. But his friend, the comedian John Mulaney, was moved by the reality of the thing—Minhaj, the son of Muslim American immigrants, “was going to make fun of the biggest worst sonofabitch that ever got to be president ever.”

Now, with Patriot Act in its fourth season, Minhaj does “woke TED talks,” or what he describes to me as “more storytelling in the same vein as Colin Quinn or Mike Birbiglia.” This means the comedy about his personal life—he and his wife and college sweetheart, Beena Patel, recently welcomed a baby girl—has faded to the background. Not that it was ever particularly pronounced. “I respect the privacy of the people who I love,” he says, “and they didn’t sign up for this.” And he means it. Lots of celebrities won’t post pictures of their kids’ faces on social media, but Minhaj asks that his daughter’s name be off the record. Instead, he chooses to talk about his youth. Thus, by rooting personal details in the past, Minhaj can trick an audience into thinking he’s sharing more of his current self than he actually is.

Minhaj grew up in Davis, California, near Sacramento: “the punching bag of the state—everyone thinks everything north of the Bay Area is just fields and sadness.” This is also the artistic terrain of Joan Didion and Greta Gerwig, so—white. Minhaj’s father immigrated in 1982. He was born here and raised by his father for eight years while his mother completed her medical degree in India. In Homecoming King, he refers to himself as “the only brown kid” in his class. He was brought up in a conservative Muslim home; unlike with other comedians, you can sense the eternal good kid in him, the one who will still drop his wife’s hand in public if he passes an “auntie or uncle, like, we are married!” He also grew up with fleeting exposure to television, which meant even less exposure to comedy. So no early idols—no Simpsons, no nothing.

“They didn’t get to me early enough,” says Minhaj. “I remember in college everyone being like, ‘Oh, my God, Dave Letterman is my god,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s nice.’ ”

UCLA (premed) was the dream, but then he ran into someone he knew who warned him of the rigor of the classes, so he decided to go to U.C. Davis, where he’d likely get a better GPA. “I got scared,” he says. “Then I lied to all my friends and said I went to Davis because I got a scholarship. I know people laugh at this now, but it’s what it represents for me.”

This is a man who, after devoting a Patriot Act episode to Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family, had to contend with death threats and hang-up calls. (“If this person is calling my cell phone, it means they know my area code, it means they know where I live.”) Can we really be dwelling on the wounds of college admissions past? I was wait-listed and rejected from my first-choice school, but you don’t see me bringing it up 22 years later in a celebrity profile.

“I self-sabotaged and I was like, I’m never letting this happen again. So by the time I started driving to open mics in San Francisco”—his peers included Ali Wong, Maria Bamford, and Moshe Kasher—“I told myself I just had to go for it. I really think it’s informed the decisions I make now.”

While most of us just guess at what made us the way we are, Minhaj is hyper-aware of what motivates him. There’s a precision to his personality, an intellectual calm that comes through when the cameras turn on. It’s beyond what happens when a performer delivers a piece of rehearsed writing. The effect is not just that of a stand-up comedian (the NSA, amirite?) playing to the energy of a crowd, but a storyteller playing directly to an individual. Even when the cameras are off, Minhaj speaks in whole paragraphs, particularly when it comes to his community.

“Yes, hate crimes happened to our house on 9/11, but the other 364 days, we live as this new group in America. The race discussion in this country, the cognitive framework, has always been a black-white conversation, but post-1970s you have an influx of immigrants from South Asia, Iran, the Middle East, Latin America, a group of children coming of age who are able to put their spin on what America is. But at the same time, in India, there’s still this even wider generational divide.”

He asks if I’m familiar with Section 377, a law in the Indian Penal Code that criminalized homosexuality until it was ruled unconstitutional last year, though it was a relic from British colonial rule.

“They took everything from us, and we decided to keep their homophobia? It’s also why Indians are loving Brexit. The way they divided us all up? We’re like, Oh, yeah, you should totally separate from the EU.”

He is aware that there is an Indian woman in Boris Johnson’s cabinet—“I know! Sleeper cell. It’s so much easier to take down the British Empire from within.” Then he smiles and turns to inspect some of Qamar’s silk-screened T-shirts, satisfied he’s nailed the point.

At first, the comparisons to fellow Daily Show alum John Oliver were obvious, if superficial. (It’s like Last Week Tonight but brown! And standing!) There’s also substantive overlap when it comes to shedding light on complex global issues, and in verbal flourishes when it comes to describing the players. (“ ‘Noncriminal arrests’ is such an oxymoron. It’s like ‘Chatty Clarence Thomas’ or ‘Remorseful Louis CK.’ ”) But Minhaj has given himself a unique feat to pull off: He has approximately six times the lead-story real estate as Last Week Tonight, during which he has the task of making just one news story funny.

“I’m struck by how much my two daughters like his show,” says Fareed Zakaria, who bonded with Minhaj during a hike at a tech conference last year. “They’re 16 and 11 and they don’t watch much political television at all. They don’t watch my show, for example. But my 11-year-old and I once watched three of his shows back-to-back—at her request.”

Patriot Act episodes run the gamut, topically, but Minhaj usually waits for some kind of back door into a story, both to differentiate it from a 60 Minutes piece and to give him enough meat on the bone. The takedown episode of Supreme in the first season “was actually an analysis of the Carlyle Group and the intrinsic value of hype. It started with hoodies and allowed me to talk about bomber jets.” A season four segment on the unionization debate within the $139-billion-a-year video game industry took six months to jell. As for how the stories are chosen, Minhaj says that sometimes it starts as a news story that needs a personal hook and sometimes it’s a personal story just waiting for the data points to reveal themselves. After a friend overdosed on fentanyl, he felt “the urgency with the words,” and devoted an episode to this wave of the opioid crisis. In September, Minhaj put his face on the student-loan issue—the focus of a standout season two episode—when he testified before Congress, singling out predatory lenders.

“The common denominator among all comedians is we are mining our own lives for jokes,” says Mulaney. “I really admire that Hasan can personalize the news, or make the news more personal through metaphor, night after night.”

When it comes to means of personalizing his material, second only to metaphor is Minhaj’s jones for technology. He has acknowledged and embraced screens, both within the format of the show and how viewers are watching it.

As executive producer and showrunner Steve Bodow says, “Hasan, Prashanth [Venkataramanujam, cocreator and executive producer], and the team made it a priority to integrate all these complex animated graphics into every moment of the show’s onscreen presentation.” Bodow, who was also a showrunner on The Daily Show during Minhaj’s run, adds, “It doesn’t look like anything else on television, or whatever it is we’re calling it now. Hasan is deeply tuned into that storytelling style. Constantly in motion.”

As Minhaj says, “Netflix is like electricity at this point. Or water—it’s just this constant flow of content. The medium is the message,” he says. “When we first designed the set, some of the older critics would be like, ‘Isn’t there too much information happening on the screen? Shouldn’t you be at a desk with a single image over your shoulder?’ And I’m like: Do you realize how fast and how many taps we’re doing per second, just in our day-to-day lives?”

He had been working on the Saudi Arabia episode for a long time when the murder of Jamal Khashoggi “put everything into hyperdrive.” Suddenly, the world was watching. What came out was a cannily pop explanation of the brutal regime at the center of the Muslim world. In that episode, Minhaj identifies Saudi Arabia as “the boy-band manager of 9/11—they didn’t write the songs, but they helped get the group together.”

“With Saudi Arabia, they don’t take dissidents lightly. Also 1.6 billion Muslims around the world have to pray towards this place,” he says. “My sister was like, You’re gonna say that onstage? You are going to call out a country that we all pray to but you feel does not represent our values? It’s the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. What do you think he does to people who question his power?”

Both his sister and his wife asked him to take a step back, to make sure he truly understood what he was about to do. They worried he was being stubborn and selfish and “it was beyond just getting the episode pulled.” Did he really want to live with the consequences of this? Did he want to ever make hajj in his life? His comedian friends, for whom there’s no such thing as a sacred cow, took the opposite position.

“They’re like, ‘But you’re saying the truth, man.’ But I’m like, ‘Yeah, man, but I’m also trying to live to see these retweets.’ ” In the end, the compulsion to speak up, to “go for it,” won out.

“Comedians have this platform. Especially right now and especially the platform I have. You can be a provocateur. You can say crazy shit for crazy shit’s sake. Or you can aim that towards something.”

Minhaj’s immediate community has been a mix of support and, unwittingly, part of the problem. He was never up for Jon Stewart’s gig, but several comedian friends, under the guise of “genuine leveling,” offered up their opinion, unprompted, that he would never get it.

“They were like, ‘They couldn’t give it to you, man. Just imagine saying The Daily Show With Hasan Minhaj. How is Doritos gonna put ads up against that?’ ”

This, in particular, stung. There’s a lot in a name, especially for Minhaj, who grew up around enough Chads and Codys that they remain his go-to dude names for a joke. When he appeared on Ellen earlier this year, he tried to get her to nail the pronunciation (she never quite did). He argued that if America can get “Benedict Cumberbatch” and “Timothée Chalamet” right, they can handle Hasan Minhaj. What America heard was charming repartee between host and guest, but Minhaj’s father, who was in the audience along with his mother, heard something else.

“I got a big lecture in the car afterwards on ‘Why do you do this stuff? Why do you make a scene?’ But this is the assimilation argument, that we should just be grateful to be at the party at all,” he says. “I know it’s Ellen and I know this is a big deal—but can we do it on our terms?”

There’s “our” terms and then there’s Hasan Minhaj’s terms. He asks me, earnestly, if I think you have to be “fucked up” to be funny. This is a long-standing debate he’s had with other comedians. I ask him to define fucked up.

“Any of it. Comedians like Rock and Louis talk about it, but I’m like: Is this the cost of doing comedy? I don’t want this.”

I tell him I can’t speak to comedians, but I can speak to writers. I know that people glorify David Foster Wallace, or leave nips of whiskey on Hemingway’s grave even though Hemingway never wrote drunk. Even our most revered depressives and hedonists finished their thoughts before they succumbed to them. Or else we never would have heard of them.

“That’s true,” he says, seeming unconvinced.

“What did you get on your AP exams?”

“You know?” he asks, his face brightening. “I don’t remember. I actually don’t remember. That’s probably a good sign.”

THROUGHOUT: HAIR PRODUCTS BY ORIBE; GROOMING PRODUCTS BY FOREST ESSENTIALS; GROOMING BY ERICA SAUER; TAILOR, WENDEL JOHNSTON; SET DESIGN BY GILLE MILLS; PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY COCO KNUDSON; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS

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