“I’m one of Canada’s busier stand-up comedians. You know, I have about six jobs at any given time so that I can eke out a middle-class existence in Etobicoke.”

There is something more than affable about Ali Hassan’s honest approach to life. Born and raised in Montreal to Pakistani parents, he felt he was destined for greatness, he just didn’t know what kind. 

As a dutiful son, he did a degree at McGill, and an MBA at McMaster. When he confessed to his mother that he wanted to go to cooking school, she simply said, “that’s nonsense, we can’t have that.” 

Instead, he borrowed some tuition and became “the worst student in an IT program and then the worst employee as an IT consultant in Chicago.”

“But the good news was it got me to Chicago for a year and a half and I got to experience a passion for food and the arts in general. It just reinforced that I could not be doing this long term. And so I when I moved back from Chicago, I started a catering company and cooking school. It was a bit of impostor syndrome: I was woefully unqualified to do that.

“I may not have gotten that cooking show, but standing on stage, delivering a comedic tale of my journey through food is pretty much as good because it’s so personal.”

—Comic Ali Hassan

“I’d try something at home and then I’d be like, ‘OK, I like the way this tastes! this works!’ And then I’d go and teach it the next week. It was like open mic but for food. It was a really wonderful experience and I thought my life would be in food. Never since that time have I been quite as focused on this one goal which I had back then: for about five or six years I wanted to be a host on the Food Network.

“I was convinced that I was better than 30 percent of these people who have shows. Now that’s easy to say that when you’re sitting in your underwear in your mother’s basement with no idea what it takes to do what they do.”

He spent a decade learning and auditioning, getting closer and closer, all the time accumulating knowledge. So much knowledge that, by the time he was finally getting network calls, it was too much: “they wanted the host to be a sort of stand-in for the presumably unknowledgeable viewers.”

And so, there he stood with a decade’s worth of knowledge about cooking and nowhere to go. Luckily, a second passion was in the works. After hosting some large South Asian weddings, Mr. Hassan realized he had a flair for mastering the ceremonies. Comedy might be a good way, he thought, to increase his confidence when hosting on The Food Network.

This means into an end led to a comedian whose primary material is food. He quotes his wife saying, “it’s incredible! You’ve made this life for yourself and for your family chasing this goal that never happened — you created this wonderful life that you really enjoy while chasing something else.”

“I may not have gotten that cooking show, but standing on stage delivering a comedic tale of my journey through food is pretty much as good because it’s so personal.”

For Mr. Hassan, food is not about nutrition: it’s a much more social phenomenon. If he has one piece of advice for restauranteurs, it is “for the love of God, please, don’t use AI to create your menus! And don’t have QR codes to immediately rob us of the very social thing that we wanted to do — we’re right on our phones again as soon as we get in. 

“Somebody at The New York Times wrote that the menu is the window into the soul of a restaurant. There’s no soul in using AI to talk about ‘glistening greens bathed in a milky dressing.’ Just talk about what you’re serving.”

Anyone who has the wit — and humility — to accept a Wellington friend’s excuse for not attending his show because it overlaps with Pumpkinfest has the everyman knack of identifying what we have in common. Mr. Hassan’s gift is to find a  gentle absurdity that shows how mistakes and accidents confirm our shared humanity.  

Ali Hassan brings his one-man show, “Does this Taste Funny?” to The Regent Theatre on Saturday 18 October.