There’s a lot to unpack there. No doubt the New Yorker wanted to do a hit piece, and their credibility will deservedly suffer, but I also don’t think anyone cares if he created narrative coincidence for when the prom rejection happened. We care about whether he pretended to be the victim of a hate crime that didn’t happen to him. It’s the difference between first-person and third-person storytelling. I’m definitely willing to revise my view of Hasan again, but he still seems oblivious to the damage that can be done to other people’s credibility by placing himself inside the narrative instead of using other characters for the parts he didn’t experience. That’s where the line between exaggeration and fabrication lies.
This is truly an ESH (everyone sucks here) situation.
It’s funny that they mention the bigger fish trope. Before I even started reading, I was wondering if they’d touch on the difference between exaggerating the size of the fish for a better story and making up hate crimes or bigotry generally. Only the latter is problematic. The part that still feels deceptive is that he had to pretend the mosque infiltration happened to him specifically. The rest probably does fall under reasonable exaggeration of times and places, but that one is an uncomfortably fuzzy line at best. It’s also the one he’s vaguest about in his video, which doesn’t seem like a coincidence.
New Birbiglia on Netflix.
I enjoyed this. Not as much as The New One, which I loved (and which I had tickets to see live, except Covid scuppered it, goddammit), but more than Thank God for Jokes, which was hit-and-miss for me.
Somehow, I haven’t seen Don’t Think Twice yet. To the library!
Thank God For Jokes may be the most impersonal of his specials, but I do think he reached peak form there. I fall asleep to old standup specials, and it’s my favorite for that. The Muppet story gets me every time.
As for The Old Man and the Pool, we’ve seen it three times now, each with a different delivery. The first time was in a small venue in New York shortly after COVID vaccines. He was rusty, and so were we, as he reminded us. The closing bit is pure crowd work, and he had us in absolute stitches that night, owing largely to the direct personal interaction with audience members. We caught the show again when the tour came through Seattle, and that bit didn’t work nearly as well in a larger theater. It’s too impersonal, and the bit felt forced. But after some change in approach, I think he absolutely nailed it for the special. It’s no mistake that he’s singling out individuals to draw their reactions into the flow, which plays better with camera closeups as well. All that said, I do think his delivery for the rest of the show almost got too polished.
Definitely watch it, I really liked it, and Mike’s performance in it is great.