Commentary: What’s wilder than Hasan Minhaj’s tales? The FBI surveillance my Muslim community actually did endure

Last month, an article in the New Yorker detailed discrepancies in comedian Hasan Minhaj’s standup specials. In one story, Minhaj recounts growing up in a Muslim community in Northern California, and his experiences with an FBI informant, Craig Monteilh. The story was a fabrication. But Monteilh was real. In the mid-2000s, he was hired by the FBI to pose as a convert to Islam and work as an informant in Orange County mosques.

I’m no comedian. I have no opinion on what the appropriate percentage of fact and fiction a comic’s jokes ought to be, or