Indian-American Muslim comedian will get to roast Donald Trump at media dinner

WASHINGTON: An Indian-American comedian of Muslim faith with roots in Aligarh will skewer a US President whose administration many critics say is both anti-immigrant and Islamophobic.

Hasan Minhaj

, the US-born comic whose parents immigrated to California from Uttar Pradesh, will on April 29 headline the first White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner with President Trump in the Oval Office. Trump and his White House staff are boycotting the dinner, saying the mainstream media is ranged against them. Minhaj’s choice for the prime slot echoes the US mainstream media’s own charge that the Trump administration is dodgy, out-of-kilter on various issues, and does not respect the First Amendment.

From repeatedly calling the media ''dishonest'' to charging it will peddling ''fake news,'' Trump and his cohorts have aggravated ties with the press to such an extent that the WHCA dinner -- a bonhomous annual affair where journalists, entertainers, celebrities, and administration officials dine out over food and laughter -- was mired in recrimination from the very beginning. Trump sent his regrets about not being able to attend and his aides, while joining the boycott, made it clear that the reason was the adversarial relationship.

Not that it dissuaded the media from going ahead with a decades-long tradition going back to the 1940s. ''It’s a different dinner. President Trump has said he will not be coming, but we will still be celebrating the First Amendment and the importance of a free press and Hasan brings all of that,'' WHCA President Jeff Mason said as he disclosed the performer for the April 29 event on MSNBC’s ''Morning Joe.''

''He brings comedy chops, but he also brings heart,'' Mason added.

Minhaj, 31, is currently a senior correspondent on Comedy Central’s faux news program which snagged him in 2014 when he was still a minnow on the comedy circuit. He now joins the likes of

Bob Hope

, Frank Sinatra, Peter Sellers, Jay Leno, and other legends who have hosted the WHCA dinner, not to speak of more recent stars such as John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Meyers.

Trump, increasingly seen as a humourless, thin-skinned President who can’t take a joke, will be the first to miss the dinner after Reagan had to bail out following the assassination attempt on him a few days before the event.

Mason said Minhaj will likely make some jokes about the President and also about the media, but ''he’s also going to bring the message that we hope to get across that night: that the First Amendment is critical and the work of the White House press corps and journalists around the world is very important.''

''I was not looking for somebody who was going to roast the president in absentia. That’s not fair and that’s not the message we want to get across,'' he added.

Much of Minhaj’s material so far has centered on living in an immigrant ecosystem in multicultural America. He grew up mostly with his dad in Davis, California, after his mother returned to Aligarh to complete her medical education in the 1980s.

''We were basically two brown dudes trying to make it in America. He's trying to navigate being the only brown guy at his work. He's this single guy, but he's married. And he has this kid, this son he's raising. And I'm navigating growing up in this sea of white. I'm this one brown speck in my class photo,'' Minhaj once explained, narrating how millions of Americans can relate to the immigrant and first generation experience because the narrative keeps repeating with different communities in different generations.

Incidentally, Indian-Americans of Muslim heritage are doing remarkably well in every sphere of life, comedy and entertainment included.

Aziz Ansari (both in Columbia, South Carolina), whose parents immigrated from Chennai, has just nailed a second season of his hit show Master of None on Netflix, and Zeshan Bagewadi (born in Chicago), whose father hails from North Karnataka and mother from Hyderabad, is getting rave reviews for his soul album Vetted. Mumbai-born Aasif Mandvi was a contributing correspondent to Jon Stewart's Daily Show before he peeled off to write the HBO comedy show The Brink.