When stand-up feels like a PowerPoint presentation.

The Moral of the Story 

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

INSIDE HASAN MINHAJ, there are two wolves. One is a person Minhaj regularly describes in his new Netflix special, The King's Jester: a loose cannon, a man who cannot control his wildest impulses. He's daring. He stands up to power. He makes unwise, chaotic decisions that cause uproar in his family. That guy, that wolf, is the subject of Minhaj's stories about himself. He appears largely in retrospect, a character reconstructed through the comedian's memories of his own actions and occasionally through video or photographic evidence. But the other guy, the second version of Minhaj, is the one we actually see onstage. And that guy is a bit of a wet blanket.

In The King's Jester, Minhaj is every bit as rapid-fire and arms-flailing and slightly manic as he always has been as a correspondent on The Daily Show and in his Netflix series, Patriot Act. But the broader impression he communicates is one of slickness and over rehearsal, the performative upbeat energy of a motivational speaker or a guy trying to get you in on his multilevel-marketing company. He's a tryhard, that second wolf. He's got every line down pat-along with every gesture, every facial movement, and every vocal cadence. Stand-up, especially when it reaches the point of being filmed for a special, is often controlled within an inch of its life; there's no blaming Minhaj for being well prepared. It's just that his high-school-forensics-winner mode is so at odds with that other wolf, the impulsive one, the jackass who can't keep his mouth shut.