Homecoming King

This analysis activity and culminating writing assignment on Hasan Minhaj’s 2017 Netflix Special Homecoming King asks students to consider the ways in which comedy is used to explore difficult personal and societal topics. The special explores topics such as Islamophobia, being a first generation American, adolescence, sibling relationships, interracial dating, etc, all while staying centered on Minhaj’s personal narrative.

Teaching Resources

A Note about the Resources

Optional Assessment
The study of this comedy special and the completion of the subsequent activity can be entirely formative, or you could use the culminating writing assignment as a summative assessment. Modified versions of the IB Paper 1 or AP FRQ2 rubrics could be used to assess the task.

Link to Transcript
The best transcript I’ve found of the show can be found here, and is useful for when students are looking at the work after having watched it.

IB Language and Literature
The stand-up special employs both traditional narrative techniques as well as visuals that support the story and explore global issues, making it a worthy medium to examine as a non-literary text in IB Language and Literature. As it is a full one-hour special and is rich with text and visuals, it constitutes a whole work.

(In general, there are so many other comedy specials like Trevor Noah’s Son of Patricia, John Mulaney’s Kid Gorgeous and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette or Douglas which are great options for non-literary texts for you and your students to navigate together. So many of these texts explore, through humor, global issues of immense significance; Noah examines growing up under apartheid, Mulaney investigates his Catholic upbringing, Gadsby takes on rape culture and sexism, and Minhaj reflects on the immigrant experience in America and Islamophobia.)

Image by Pierre Rosa from Pixabay