We caught up with funny Brummie, Hasan Al-Habib on faith, the power of making bullies laugh and the super-humility of Jack Grealish!
Image by Matt Stronge
We’re not short of funny Brummies – indeed we’ve interviewed many of them in these pages – and here’s another home-grown talent doing brilliant things. Award-winning comic Hasan Al-Habib is more than a string of witty one-liners. He’s planning to turn some tricky subjects into lols in his upcoming Edinburgh Fringe show, Stuck in The Middle (East) With You while his solo debut tour, Death to the West (Midlands) was a sell-out.
Hasan performed at the Midlands regional heats of the BBC New Comedy Awards 2024, won the 2023 Birmingham Comedy Festival Breaking Talent Award and was a finalist at the 2022 Chortle Student Comedy Awards. Hasan also took part in BBC show Pilgrimage which aired last month.
COULD HAVE BEEN A NIGHTMARE…
If you haven’t watched Pilgrimage yet, we highly recommend. It’s a gentle but thought-provoking watch that follows a bunch of celebrities from different walks of life as they take on the Pilgrimage from Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire to Holy Island at Lindisfarne exploring their faith or lack of, as they follow in the footsteps of early Celtic Christian saints. Hasan had watched the show previously and since people he liked had taken part, including some comedians and fellow Muslims, he thought why not? This year’s bunch included Ashley Banjo, Hermione Norris, Patsy Kensit, Tasha Ghouri, Jayne Middlemiss and Ashley Blaker alongside Hasan.
He says: “I wanted to get an understanding of what faith means to the other people, particularly people of different religious convictions, or of no religious conviction at all. I wanted to understand how people without a particular religion operate on a day-to-day basis with regards to ethics and morality. I also liked the format. There’s no competition – no one’s getting voted off. Ashley (Banjo) isn’t up against Susan Boyle!” He adds: “We all got on really well. It could have been a nightmare so there was some risk involved. I thought they’d all be TV people and they weren’t.”
DIVINE LIGHT
Hasan, Ashley and Tasha became particularly close. Every morning Ashley spent time by himself reading the Bible which made Hasan think about his own practice. Hasan says: “He’s a very calm guy, and I wonder if that daily practice of reminding yourself of who you are in this world, what your role is, and how you believe you should live contributed to that. I really felt like I’d learnt something from someone of a different religion to me.”
The day the group reached Holy Island was moving not least thanks to huge shards of heavenly sunbeams breaking through picture perfect clouds. Hasan remembers: “There’s something about that place that’s just divine. The way the early morning light reflected off the sands as we walked across to the island was stunning. I remember Ashley Banjo saying, “guys, this is crazy.” You just understood in that moment why people would travel so far to come here.”
As well as the spiritual journey, Hasan says he’s enjoyed free tickets to see Diversity at the Palladium so that’s a bonus! What’s also a bonus is that Pilgrimage has in some way legitimised Hasan’s stand-up career in his parents’ eyes. They’re not against it exactly, more ambivalent, but recently Hasan was introduced to someone from the council by his mum as, ‘my son. He has a PhD and he’s a stand-up comedian’ which felt like a turning point. The doctorate in oncology from Cambridge is often lobbed in, but the stand-up was a new development.
BEST AUDIENCE
Hasan won the Birmingham Comedy Festival Breaking Talent Award a couple of years ago which meant a lot. He recalls: “It felt so nice to be recognised in my home town. It’s validation. Some great people won it before me and since.” The year after his win, Hasan played an absolutely packed show – the organisers tell us there was literally no more space in the venue and they were turning people away.
If you’d like to catch Hasan locally, he’s booked into the Birmingham Comedy Festival Presents gig at Moseley Folk & Arts Festival this year. The festival is just a week after the Edinburgh Fringe and normally Hasan wouldn’t book anything so soon after, but this one’s a bit special. It’s in his home town for a start and anyone that’s been in previous years will know it has a wonderful feel-good vibe that is a beautiful way to end summer. Hasan says Birmingham has the best audiences and in his mind, he’ll move back here at some point, but for now London’s home.
THE FUNNY ONE
Growing up in Birmingham was a bit of a mixed bag and school was a challenge at times. Being the only Iraqi in the classroom in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq war meant he was bullied. Accepting some people just don’t like you, Hasan found that making them laugh improved the situation. He adopted a scientific approach to being funny and started to think about the mechanics of how to make people laugh. For instance, in the classroom Hasan would contemplate: “When George speaks he’s more likely to get a laugh than when Ben speaks. Why? Is it timing, social status, just being labelled the funny one?”
Teachers that should have known better targeted Hasan with questions like, what should we do with Sadam Hussain after his capture? When Hasan suggested he should be executed because he’d killed a lot of people the teacher said, “doesn’t that make you as bad as him?” It’s difficult to challenge a grown up in that position so Hasan accepted that was how it was.
On the plus side, Hasan still loves Birmingham – the accent, the humbleness, all of it. He cites Jack Grealish as an example of super humility. Stick with us. When an interviewer compared Jack to an encyclopaedia of football, he was quick to admit he didn’t know what that meant. Hasan says: “Most people would pretend they knew what it meant. When I was studying with a lot of posh people from the south, if there was a term they didn’t know, they’d pretend.”
FRONT ROW
Hasan still feels the fear going on stage, intensified by specific audience members. For instance, if one of his comedy heroes, Frankie Boyle and/or his parents were in the front row, that might be problematic. Recently Hasan auditioned for SNL UK which sounds like an odd experience. In a huge studio that seats 400 people, he had to do a five-minute set in front of five TV executives with a massive camera and just before he went on stage a runner told Hasan that the creator of SNL, Lord Michaels was watching live from the US.
Hasan didn’t get the gig this time but is thrilled the show has been a success and is giving young comedians a platform. He also says if you can’t handle rejection, it’s not the right industry for you.