Emotional Truth is a Synonym for Bullshit
"When I come back to Chicago I'm gonna hop into the storytelling scene with a whole series of bullshit. I'll do my story about my gender transition, my immigration from Ireland, my trauma. It'll all be about my experiences of trauma at the hands of others because, dude, trauma is the coin of the realm in this space. So many of the storytellers are doing a five-minute version of Jussie Smollett, fictionalizing a faux history of trauma in order to win the audience and gain status in the Olympiad of Victims."
I was on a tear, venting my frustration at how that very scene went from people telling true stories on the fly into a series of the same faces using these nights as a platform to constantly create tales designed to elevate themselves as professional winners of StorySlams.
I used to state before telling a story onstage that each was about 78% truth and the rest is narrative gilding of the lily aka bullshit to make it better story. Part of that was the fact that when telling a story from your past it is the natural tendency to misremember things and, like the frog DNA in the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, pieces of unnatural memory are inserted to make it a real thing. This isn't strictly lying but it approaches that line. I also used to teach that a good story does not position the teller as either hero or villain, oppressor or victim. That's personal agitprop and is usually completely obvious in its attempt to manipulate the image of the teller.
Take, as an example, the musical film The Greatest Showman. The truth is that P.T. Barnum was a brilliant grifter, a showman who understood how gullible the audience was and how ridiculous spectacle presented as fact would be embraced as such if the lie was artfully told. He was not, in any serious retelling, an advocate for the marginalized and outcast. The film, however, re-positions him as the sort of progressive do-gooder that would appeal to a younger, more socially aware audience. He went from Donald Trump to someone more generous and empathetic and also could sing and dance. They ate it up with zero regard for the truth of the mirror.
As comedians, long known to be making shit up for laughs—if you believe that anything from, say, Rodney Dangerfield's or Steven Wright's set list is factual, you're a special kind of an idiot—shift toward the kind of show that is designed to both make us laugh and utilize current political issues as a leveraging moment, the questions about truth versus fiction becomes more pressing. Did Hannah Gadsby really nearly get beaten up at a bus stop for presenting as lesbian? Did Dave Chappelle actually have the conversations with his transgender fan? Did Bert Kreischer truthfully infiltrate the Russian mob? Does any of that matter?
The lines between comedy, journalism, embellishment, and mistruths told to make a strawman argument are getting murkier.
Digging into his last two specials, Malone reveals Hasan Minhaj as a comic who leans on fictions to make real-world arguments, putting himself closer to the center of news stories to make him seem more brave or wronged or in danger. To take one example, Minhaj says in “The King’s Jester” (2022) that after the government passed the Patriot Act in the wake of Sept. 11, an undercover F.B.I. informant named Brother Eric had infiltrated his childhood mosque and had dinner at his house. Minhaj recalls how he sniffed him out and, in a prank, asked about getting a pilot’s license, which led to a police officer throwing him against a car.
The New Yorker found that there was such a man working in counterterrorism but that Minhaj never met him. Minhaj defended his fabrications as fibs in service to “emotional truth.” For someone in the running to be the next host of “The Daily Show,” that term sounds a little too much like Kellyanne Conway’s euphemism “alternative facts.”
Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?” He said that he’d never told anyone on the show about this letter, despite the fact that there were concerns for his security at the time and that Netflix had hired protection for Minhaj. The Brother Eric story, Minhaj said, was based on a hard foul he received during a game of pickup basketball in his youth. Minhaj and other teen-age Muslims played pickup games with middle-aged men whom the boys suspected were officers. One made a show of pushing Minhaj to the ground. Minhaj insisted that, though both stories were made up, they were based on “emotional truth.” The broader points he was trying to make justified concocting stories in which to deliver them. “The punch line is worth the fictionalized premise,” he said.
"Emotional truth."
"The punchline is worth the fictionalized premise."
The high school ex-girlfriend who accepted Minhaj’s invitation to prom, only to jilt him on her doorstep for racist reasons while her new (white) date slipped a corsage on her wrist? She had actually turned down Minhaj several days earlier, and this too-perfect anecdote, launched not as stand up but at The Moth StorySlam was completely fictional. This woman who politely declined that prom invitation as a teenager has been receiving death threats for years thanks to Minhaj, a fact about which he is nonchalant. Maybe this girl didn’t do what he described, he says, and maybe what he described wasn’t done to him—but it had certainly happened sometime, to someone, somewhere: “There are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience.”
One of the interesting trends in our partisan divide has come in the form of promoting personal anecdotes as evidence for social change. The concept of "lived truth" is competing with data accrued scientifically on the grounds that the institutions that gather the information are systemically racist and sexist therefore we must accept the lived truth of stories told about personal experience as a representation of the over-arching truth in society.
Culture is a finicky thing and as we move to more frequent performers using fictionalized anecdotes to illustrate larger societal points we begin to lose the center of genuine empathy. How can I find empathy with someone whose story of victimization at the hands of one oppressor or the other if the tale is tainted with mistruth? Let's face it, "emotional truth" is nothing more than manipulative horseshit included to either increase the status of the teller or boost an argument being made regardless of it being a news story, a nonfiction book, an op-ed, or a stand up routine.
The mostly white, liberal audience resents not the lies but the fact that before they found out it was fiction, they were empathetic. Now, they’re just voyeurs of oppression pornography.
When we digest our news increasingly through the lens of social media and late night comedy, the layering of emotional truth versus actual truth leads us to some fairly untrustworthy places. For example, I'm quite certain that Donald Trump's "emotional truth" was that the 2020 election was, indeed, stolen from him but that sure as shit doesn't align with the facts. Rachel Dolezal convincingly pretended to be black for years. Her justification was that her personal truth superseded the actual truth. Most thinking people recognize this as simply a justification for being caught in a lie. James Frey completed fabricated his own story to sell his memoir which, in my opinion, is only slightly different than Hasan Minhaj making up being terrorized to sell tickets to his show.
At a time when we can't seem to trust anyone, it seems relevant to focus on sticking to the proveable truth rather than the emotional truth.
