The New York Times actually has a comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, which is fine. Still, someone needs to tell him to avoid writing about ethics, which he apparently does not comprehend. I, in contrast, have extensive experience in both comedy and ethics, and can say with confidence that his column “Lying in Comedy Isn’t Always Wrong, but Hasan Minhaj Crossed a Line” is the worst published ethics analysis I have read this year, and perhaps ever. Zimmerman’s column is ethics nonsense from the headline to the end.

Let’s start with the headline. There is no lying in comedy, any more than there’s lying in any performing art. Since the sole purpose of comedy is to make a targeted audience laugh, anything goes, or should. (This is one of the rare instances of my being in agreement with Bill Maher). For now, I don’t want to be distracted into justifying anything other than making stuff up, which stand-up comics do regularly and should, but if they are pretending something is true when it isn’t, that’s not unethical. It isn’t unethical because they are comedians, and their audience knows—or should— what their purpose is not to inform, but to amuse.

Since so much of what a comic says is not true—a duck, a Canadian and an acrobat did not walk into a bar—-there is no breach of trust when that comic states anything else as a fact when it isn’t. Dave Chappelle often starts a story by saying, “This is true,” which means that he has decided that the story is going to be funnier if the audience thinks of it as really happening. I don’t assume the story is true because Chappelle says so, but he’s asking for the suspension of disbelief from his audience, just as “The Exorcist” was when it showed Regan’s head turn backwards. We suspend our disbelief in the possessed little girl to be horrified; we suspend disbelief in what comedians say to be amused.

The target of Zinoman’s accusation of unethical comedy is, as the headline states, Hasan Minhaj, who has a Netflix concert streaming. He can’t have “crossed a line” because there are no lines. There are no ethicd rules for comics, nor can or should there be.

Here is an example of what Zinoman calls “crossing a line”:

Minhaj says in “The King’s Jester” (2022) that after the government passed the Patriot Act in the wake of Sept. 11, an undercover F.B.I. informant named Brother Eric had infiltrated his childhood mosque and had dinner at his house. Minhaj recalls how he sniffed him out and, in a prank, asked about getting a pilot’s license, which led to a police officer throwing him against a car.

The New Yorker found that there was such a man working in counterterrorism but that Minhaj never met him. Minhaj defended his fabrications as fibs in service to “emotional truth.” For someone in the running to be the next host of “The Daily Show,” that term sounds a little too much like Kellyanne Conway’s euphemism “alternative facts.”

No, in fact it doesn’t. Kellyanne Conway was defending a silly exaggeration by the President of the United States; a comic defending making up a story for an audience is nothing like that at all. Minhaj’s “emotional truth” blather is dumb, but he wasn’t saying that to be funny, and it wasn’t part of a comedy act. Did his story about getting thrown against a car for punking an FBI agent get laughs? If so, he had no need to defend himself.

One by one, Zinoman stoops to rationalizations and false principles of “ethics.” “It’s also important to point out that many current comics think seriously about their fictions, setting their own code,” he writes, “’I am quite strict about telling the truth,’”’ Daniel Kitson once told me. ‘I am interested in engaging emotionally and I don’t want to be duplicitous.’” Well bully for Daniel Kitson. The fact that one comic, or many, chooses not to make up stories doesn’t set a new ethics standard, or any standard at all.

Here is the crux of Zinoman’s argument:

Every comic has an unspoken pact with the audience. The one Seinfeld has is different from Minhaj’s, and part of the reason has nothing to do with their intentions. Whether or not critics like me think authenticity is important, it does matter to the audience. So does honesty. And comics understand that. It’s no accident that many of the political comedians working today, especially on television, employ researchers from traditional news sources. Getting facts right matters, especially when the comedy is about grave social issues.

If every comic can dictate the standards he or she will be held to, then there are no standards for anyone. Whatever it is that Minhaj’s standards are, if they result in maximum amusement for his audience, then the standards are ethical. I saw an old Don Rickles routine from the 80’s in which the insult comic was making fun of Japanese people. He stopped and pointed to an audience member and said, “The fat Jap in the front row is laughing his ass off!” When the man told Rickles that he was not Japanese, Rickles replied, “You’re not Japanese? What the hell is the matter with your eyes, then?” And all of the audience, including the “fat Jap,” laughed uproariously. Don Rickles’ “standard” was that he insulted everyone, and there was no malice involved. For him, he wasn’t crossing any line. The audience laughed.

The unethical practice is when comedians intentionally blur the line between pundit and comic, the “clown nose off/clown nose on” trick that Jon Stewart perfected on “The Daily Show.” It’s not unethical comedy, it’s unethical political commentary, and that’s not funny. Stephen Colbert’s hateful obsessive attacks on Republicans and Trump are frequently dishonest political commentary (Trump is Putin’s “cock-holster”), but if he makes his Trump-hating audience laugh, it’s not unethical comedy. Colbert, like Stewart, often doesn’t get his facts right, and as long as he gets the requisite number of laughs, that’s fine with me, because there is no lying in comedy.

The ethical problem lies with audience members who are so incompetent and irresponsible that they choose to trust comics and what they say. (Zinoman criticizes Minaj for implying in his routines that audiences can trust him. They can’t, and if they don’t know that, they are at fault.) The gullible audience members are the unethical parties in the relationship, not the comedian who exaggerates, massages or makes up facts to ensure a big laugh.

The confusion which infuses the column is head spinning, and it is redolant with Zinoman’s own unethical biases. He criticizes Minhaj for suggesting to Barack Obama while interviewing him that Obama would lie about “all of those books, albums and movies” Obama has claimed to have read, heard or seen. Suggesting that Obama would lie? Heaven forfend: that crosses a line! Zinoman cites as sinister Russell Brand’s assertion that “you can’t trust the mainstream media.”

Anyone who claims that you can trust the mainstream media is ethically estopped from writing about ethics. Ever.

If Zinoman doesn’t find Minhaj funny because the comic isn’t truthful, that’s Zinoman’s problem. It won’t became Manhaj’s problem until the majority of his audience feels that way too.