For years, Montreal Comedian Ali Hassan, who was born a Muslim, was on a quest to be a more “cultural Muslim”, which became the focus of his stand-up stage show.
“I did my first faith show in 2017, coincidentally, on the night that Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. The show was like connecting to people about my Muslim background on a different level and I really enjoyed it,” he said during a recent phone interview. “There are many preconceived notions and things that people immediately identify with the Muslim world, like Mohammed and terrorism. I wanted to perpetuate the more sexy, sultry stories about it, and that became the core of my faith show.”
The next step for Ali was one that many of his fellow comics have taken; to take his comedy routine and convert it into book form. “I never thought that would be a possibility. I pitched the idea to various publishers. The question before me was could I write a book? And apparently, I could and did,” he said. The end result is his recently published memoir Is There Bacon in Heaven?
Ali got the idea for the inquisitive book title from famed YA novelist Judy Blume, in particular her most famous book Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
“When I was young, a lot of people from that age group grew up with Judy Blume’s books; however, boys were not asking basic questions about their bodies. The question I had dealt with something that was like an unforgivable sin with Muslims,” he said. “I was watching black, brown and white kids eat bacon, and I thought that was like a gift from God. But when I asked that question, it confused a lot of people in the Muslim community; it was a question with no set answer. I decided to let it go, but I still wondered when I could make that sacrifice and be able to go to heaven for that treasured bacon.”
Throughout his entertaining book, Ali chronicles growing up in Canada (first in New Brunswick, then in the South Shore Montreal suburb of Brossard) as the son of Pakistani immigrants who eventually settled into steady careers in the educational field in Montreal (his father taught at Dawson College, as well as Concordia and McGill universities). Ali also tried to establish himself in other career fields before breaking into comedy in 2006 (first as the world’s worst IT consultant, and then as a chef/caterer), yet struggling to maintain a balance of being a full-fledged Canadian and coming to terms with his Muslim background, traditions and culture. One good example of that is Ali’s understanding of the major Muslim holiday Eid.
“In essence, it’s like Muslim Christmas. It’s the biggest holiday of the year – but twice. We have two different Eids, but both times they are called the same thing,” he writes. “It’s reminiscent of a time when the Canadian Football League had two teams that were both named the Roughriders … Two different teams, in two completely different places in the country – same name.”
Now living in Toronto, Ali has racked up an impressive list of credits, including host of CBC’s Canada Reads and Laugh Out Loud; a frequent guest host of the popular CBC Radio program “Q”; appearances in such films as Breakaway, French Immersion and Goon; and performing his solo show Muslim, Interrupted, which was featured at the legendary Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Ali is proud of the fact that can use comedy to offset the backlash against people of South Asian backgrounds, and the pop culture stereotypes that are usually associated with the character of Quik-E-Mart employee Apu on The Simpsons. And he credits veteran comedian Russell Peters for leading the way for South Asian comics to develop and flourish in Canada towards successful careers in comedy, which was experienced by himself, Shaun Majumder and Sugar Sammy.
“Russell did the stereotypical jokes about his dad (i.e., the line attributed to his father “someone’s going to get a hurting real bad”) so that we don’t have to,” he said. “It helped us to realize that ethnicity can be both beautiful and nostalgic, and a subject that is hard not to find laughs about, not to mention a way to connect with our identity.”
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