5 Funniest Moments from Hasan Minhaj Schooling Congress About Student Loan Debt
After all, who better to articulate such a chaotic and dystopian crisis than an Indian-American Muslim comedian who was waitlisted for law school?
Comedian Hasan Minhaj just delivered some tight stand up to what is maybe the fourth worst audience in the world, following North Koreans, ISIS, and an office Christmas party.
On Tuesday, the Patriot Act host appeared on Capitol Hill to speak before the House Financial Services Committee about the $1.5 trillion student debt crisis. Specifically, he addressed the crippling reality of the cost of higher education, the shrinking of the middle class, and why policy-makers and student loan services are such douchebags.
The committee held a "long overdue" hearing on student lending and the higher education system's craven and predatory practices. Chairwoman Maxine Waters called the hearing overdue "given the scale of the crisis at hand," referring to the 45 million Americans with student loan debt—the size of which has surpassed the nation's total outstanding credit card debt and auto debt. Waters invited Minhaj to speak, considering Patriot Act's large outreach to audiences of thirty-something-year-olds and younger, who came of age amidst the worst recession since the Great Depression and whose daily struggles are dismissed by politicians who are deluded about the severity and real-world cause and effect of "millennial problems."
When Minhaj appeared before congress, he applied his usual mix of candid humor and anal-retentive research. After all, who better to articulate such a chaotic and dystopian crisis than an Indian-American Muslim comedian who was waitlisted for law school?
It's unfortunate that some of Minhaj's best lines from Tuesday's hearing only received a smattering of laughter from the back of the room amidst a miasma of Republicans' indignant huffs and that smell of fear boomers give off in the presence of minorities who know things. In that spirit, we've spotlighted some of his best bits:
1. When he reminded the room he's brown but was still invited to congress
"My name is Hasan Minaj. I'm a Muslim and I condemn radical Islamic terrorism. That has nothing to do with anything but I just want that on the record."
▲2. When he looked up the committee's actual college receipts
"We looked up where the 60 members of this committee went to college and what your school's tuition was at that time, even adjusting for inflation, college costs way less across the board," he said. "On average, this entire committee graduated from college 33 years ago and paid an inflation-adjusted tuition of $11,690 a year. Today, the average tuition at all of your same schools is almost $25,000. That's a 110 percent increase over a period of time when wages have gone up only 16 percent. So people aren't making more money, and college is objectively way more expensive. You see what's happened? We've put up a paywall to the middle class."
3. When he reminded everyone Sean Duffy was on "Real World: Boston"
Duffy proposed, "Here's the idea: If you have a 20 on your ACT you're not going to Harvard."
Minhaj countered, "Or, if your mom's Aunt Becky, you can just pay your way to USC … You and I, we're both former MTV stars. You get it!"
4. When he called predatory loan agreements "arranged marriage you can't get out of"
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5. When he went back to where he came from
"Now look, we know the deck is stacked against student borrowers in ways that it wasn't 10 or even 15 years ago, and they deserve some basic protections. Americans should not have to go bankrupt pursuing higher education, and they should never be preyed upon by underregulated loan-servicing companies. So, members of this committee, we know the government is capable of stepping in during a financial crisis, so really all I'm asking today is: Why can't we treat our student borrowers the way we treat our banks? Because 44 million Americans — that is too big to fail."
In the best closing statement in Washington since Barack Obama's mic drop at his final State of the Union, Minhaj said, "Thank you so much for your time, and I will now go back to where I came from."
▲BONUS: When he gave Maxine Waters life with his closing statement
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