Both Minhaj and Wood sat for a comedy roundtable, published this afternoon in The Hollywood Reporter, and, naturally, the blowback from the article came up. Wood offered some new insight into what it was like to be at The Daily Show when that happened, and it sounds like it was pretty confusing. “[W]hen that came out and they were like, ‘Yeah, Hasan’s not going to be the host,’ nobody would give any details and we were all trying to figure out, ‘Well, if it’s not going to be Hasan, who’s it going to be? Should I stay? Well, what happened to Hasan?'” he recalls. “It was just, ‘We’re going to reopen the search.’ Nobody could even put into words what it was you were being accused of.”
For his part, it sounds like Minhaj is over it, or at least over it enough to joke about it. “One of the first jokes that came to me was when I called a buddy, and I was like, ‘How bad is it?’ And he was like, ‘The article is bad, but the photos are good.’ I was like, ‘That’s fucking hilarious,'” he says now. “It’s also very funny to fail so bad that you bring back Jon Stewart. That’s objectively funny.” Jamie Foxx, who also participates in the roundtable, asked what they actually told Minhaj when his dreams of hosting were dashed. Minhaj describes the “showbiz call,” which is “a very loving rejection.” Adds Sarah Silverman, it’s a call that starts like, “We’re such fans of your work….” But, Minhaj concludes the anecdote, “I think everything in life, good or bad, is fodder.”
