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While I thought some of Minhaj\u2019s fabrications were unnecessary and wrongheaded, I never thought he was a \u201cpsycho.\u201d What I saw was a comic responding<\/a> to the incentives of a culture that not only prefers its politics wrapped inside a personal emotional story, but also gives clout to dramatic displays of victimhood.<\/p>\n We live in a time when seemingly everyone, no matter how rich, famous or successful, is angling to play the victim. Elon Musk invites sympathy by telling us that a company refusing to advertise on his site is equivalent to blackmail. When even Taylor Swift says she was canceled in the Time magazine article announcing her as Person of the Year, you know that the ability to repackage yourself as the underdog is limitless.<\/p>\n As it happens, this provides an opening for jokes. In Leo Reich\u2019s cleverly self-aware new special, \u201cLiterally Who Cares?\u201d<\/a> (Max), the young comic spoofs this tendency. He begins by saying his show is sponsored by his dad, who runs an incredible small business you might have heard of named Deutsche Bank. By the end, he insists he\u2019s oppressed. \u201cI read something recently that even if you haven\u2019t been oppressed, you can feel like you have and it triggers the same endorphins.\u201d<\/p>\n The comic artist currently tackling this theme best is the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, whose feature \u201cSick of Myself<\/a>\u201d introduced audiences to a character who intentionally takes pills to make herself physically ill, to gain attention and fame. Borgli\u2019s new movie, \u201cDream Scenario<\/a>,\u201d is about a beta male professor played by Nicolas Cage accused by a colleague of \u201csearching for the insult.\u201d In an outlandish twist, he starts showing up in people\u2019s dreams doing violent things, and fragile students freak out in a parody of delicate sensitivities. The professor sees himself as the real victim and is then tempted by the embrace of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and, of course, the French. In other words, this movie is riffing on the most popular victim narrative of our moment: Cancel culture.<\/p>\n Thankfully, Minhaj doesn\u2019t go there, but he gets close. At one point in his show, he said the real divide in the country was not between rich and poor, Democratic or Republican, but between \u201cthe insane\u201d and \u201cthe insufferable.\u201d<\/p>\n The insane include the people who stormed the capitol. He calls them nuts, before adding: \u201cbut fun.\u201d Then he grew more animated describing the insufferable by their \u201cNPR tote-bag energy\u201d and \u201chall monitor\u201d tendencies. It was a head fake to The New Yorker article before a pivot to self-deprecation, poking fun at the time he corrected Ellen DeGeneres on her show for mispronouncing his name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n