Stand-up comedian Ali Hassan digs into his days as a chef in Does This Taste Funny?
The funnyman spent over 12 years in the food and restaurant sector before his comedy career took off
Ali Hassan.
Anvil Theatre presents Ali Hassan: Does This Taste Funny? on April 19 at 7:30 pm
STAND-UP COMEDIAN and actor Ali Hassan was 13 years old when he inadvertently developed a love of cooking. That fondness grew out of a slight to his Muslim Pakistani mother.
“I insulted my mother’s sandwiches as a young man,” Hassan tells Stir via a hands-free interview while he’s on a three-hour drive through Ontario. Her response to his grossly harsh phrasing at the time involved words along these lines: “Then make your own.” She could hold a grudge, he says, and she meant it. So off to the kitchen he went.
“I started with sandwiches then moved on to pasta and chili and that kind of stuff,” says Hassan, a father of four who was born in Fredericton, raised in Montreal, and is now based in Toronto. “So I’ve been cooking for a long time and made it my profession for about 12 years. I was a caterer and a cooking instructor and a chef in a couple of different restaurants and a manager in a restaurant. So I have this life in food that I’ve never explored.”
Hassan is digging into his culinary background now in his new solo show, Does This Taste Funny?, which comes to Anvil Theatre as part of a B.C. and Yukon tour. And while Hassan may not be widely known as a former chef, he’s no stranger to Canadian audiences. In fact, he seems to be everywhere these days.
He hosts Laugh Out Loud on Sirius XM and CBC Radio, where he recently wrapped up this year’s Canada Reads. He’s a frequent guest host of As It Happens and q, and he’s a recurring guest star on the TV series Sort Of and Run The Burbs. He has toured the country with a solo show called Muslim Interrupted (which he also performed at Edinburgh Fringe Festival) and has had roles in Mafia Inc., MySpy, Murdoch Mysteries, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, French Immersion, and Goon among other projects. The lead comedy panelist on the former George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight show, Hassan has performed at Just for Laughs and the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, his 2022 sets having aired on TV. And last year he released Is There Bacon in Heaven?: A Memoir, which explores his lifelong journey to becoming a “cultural Muslim”.
In Does This Taste Funny?, Hassan combines his passions for comedy and food. He was so entrenched in his cooking career prior to stand-up taking over, in fact, that he was determined to host a cooking show on the Food Network. The station eventually did come calling, but by that time, it had shifted away from useful, informative shows that taught people how to cook in entertaining ways to reality and competition programs, which did not interest Hassan in the slightest. “You know, the ones where you have to go through all this rigamarole—it’s like, there’s an avocado the chef has to get and it’s 50 yards away but, ‘Be careful, guys, you might get your hand chopped off when you’re reaching for it!’ That really wasn’t my passion. And I wasn’t really interested in, like, going to the home of the six-foot schnitzel.”
Meanwhile, Hassan’s stand-up comedy career was starting to take off—and he found himself loving every minute of it. “It’s my favourite thing to do,” he says, “because I'm so geared towards instant gratification. When I go a few weeks without stand-up, I start to get very, very uncomfortable. I love the pressure of figuring out things in real time. I’m a guy who can’t even figure out one side of a Rubik’s Cube, but I love this particular puzzle.
“I still like it even when the joke bombs,” he says. “I even love failing. I love the challenge of figuring out: ‘Why do I think it's funny? Why did they not consider it funny, and how do I change that to make it funny?’”
Does This Taste Funny? (which takes its name from an old joke about two cannibals and a clown) covers everything from the role food plays in culture (he goes on at length about his “journey in and out of the shawarma world”) to what it’s like cooking for four kids to diet’s impact on health. (Hassan currently eats plant-based food six days of the week and enjoys meat unapologetically the other.) What the solo act has in common with Muslim Interrupted is how humans share more similarities than differences. Food just happens to have a unique way of bringing people together.
“Food is this incredible thing that really is about community,” Hassan says. “This idea of breaking bread and meeting over meals and unifying over food and connecting over food: I think there’s a beauty in that. And then you see your friend put ketchup on his scrambled eggs and you’re like, ‘Alight, this racket is over.’ We all have our lines.
“But in general, food is this beautiful thing, this beautiful community,” he says. “And I remember when I was in working in kitchens, you know, there was, like, the Greek owner, the Sri Lankan dishwasher, the Asian chef, the Latino chef. And everybody knows like 50 to 100 words of each other’s language. The connective tissue of food is always there. It’s this beautiful way of unifying people.”
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