Hassan Phills picked comedy over basketball — and it paid off

Nestled in the corner of Toronto's  Filosophy Pastry and Espresso Bar, a café shaped like an 'L' with black benches lining it and white tables dotting the inside, is 6'3" Hassan Phills. Earth-tone clad and looming over a laptop, Phills endears himself to anyone who approaches him with a Magic Johnson-esque smile glistening through his beard.

It's hard not to. Garnering 67,000 followers on Instagram and 80,000 on TikTok Phills has melded that beaming smile, witty lines, and cosmopolitan storytelling into an act that always feels like a grand inside joke. It also helped him create Eidiot Mubarak, a post-Ramadan comedy series that celebrated its third year earlier this month with a show at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre Centre in front of a 1,200 person audience. Phils says. It's a testament to his diehard fanbase, but it's been a winding road to this destination.

"There's a wave where people want to support you, but they also want to see you take the risk," says Phills. "You can't half-ass it man."

The comic, originally from Scarborough, Ont., initially had his sights set on making it as a basketball player. He followed his hoop dreams out west, playing for the Capilano University Blues. During the summer leading up to his senior year, between working odd jobs, he'd drop in at open mics around Greater Vancouver, and saw a new love unfurling in front of him: comedy. By the fall of that year, Hassan Phills was at a crossroads: keep pursuing basketball, or go all in on comedy. Initially, he thought he could do both.

"I was in my last year of University," Phills says. "Credits up. My physique? Peak. I'm like, 'Yo, this is going to be the best season ever. When I got back to school, I was getting booked [for comedy shows.]"

Phill's two loves were on a collision course. Comedy and basketball both start to heat up in the autumn. Pursuing both required a delicate balancing act, that eventually started to teeter. 

"I'd go practice and [then] I'd go run to an open mic," he says. "Or I'd have games and I go run to a show. And sometimes I have to drop a show because I had a game.

"Here I am at that point in my life where I'm thinking about, if I could dedicate five years of my life to something I could do for the next 30, 40, I'd be in a better place.

When British-Jamaican comedian Harry "White Yardie" Gregory was doing a set in Vancouver, Phills contacted his booking manager to convince him of an opening spot even if it was only for five minutes. They gave it to him.

"I just wanted proof of concept, [to see] if I was actually funny in front of these people. His crowd was a lot of Jamaicans," says Phills, who's half Jamaican and Djiboutian.

The next stops on White Yardie's tour were in Calgary and Edmonton. Seeing an opportunity Phills asked to open there too and borrowed $1,000 from a friend to foot the travel expense.

 Phills took the leap.

"And then I paid my boy back when my OSAP kicked in," says Phills.

And then he dropped out.

After spending years sharpening his stand-up in Vancouver while living with his teammate's family, he moved back to Toronto in late 2020. He was an emerging part of the stand-up circuit but, when he was interviewed in a JoyBox Media YouTube video, he saw the benefits of moving some of his act online.

 "He asked me, 'do you have friends with benefits?' And I was like, 'oh, do you mean like, health care and shit?'" Phills says "That video kind of took off." 

To Phills, the best part was that most people online didn't know he was a comedian yet. Vlog-style videos of Phills' rants or stories have drawn millions of views, 80,000 followers on TikTok and 68,000 on Instagram, but the jokes on and off the stage about identity popped the most. Phills pulls from his observations and experiences in Toronto's cultural mosaic. The ability to understand how people from different cultures interact with each other, and themselves, is core to his comedy.

"There's so much truth in identity, and that's funny. I think the funniest things are true," says Phills "Even if I'm wrong, I'm going to be wrong and strong about it, because I actually believe that's what I was saying."

Phills' perceptive jokes about ethnicity, religion and cultural exchange exhibit a keen understanding of people around him. As a result, Phills' overall following feels closer to a community. Its a following sticky enough to follow him to most major Canadian cities, resulting in multiple comedy tours and the ability to bypass bookers. It's also been sticky enough to result in the growth of his series Eidiot Mubarak.

Originally, in 2022 the idea mirrored his humble comedy beginnings, three shows in three cities, Hamilton, Ottawa and Toronto but the Toronto show in a studio in the stockyards has become the basis of the rest.

 "After Ramadan you eat, you pray, you're just hanging out with family in the day but in the nighttime there's nothing really much to do," says Phills. "So, I'm like, 'Yo, let's do a comedy show.'"

He threw together the show using rented chairs and audio equipment and borrowed money. The show wound up being more popular than he expected.

"We had about maybe 200 people in the room, and it was tight," but the community responded, says Phills. "There's people who bought tickets to at least five of my shows and now they're on my team and helping me with marketing, promoting, set up, the whole shebang."

The next show held 700 people in a Bulgarian church in Regent Park. 

"We were joking around and saying,'600 Muslims in a church. How crazy is that?'  says Phills.  "But realistically, when you're there and you see people out there, they'll tell you it wasn't just Muslims. It was a bunch of dope people who wanted to see something happen,"

 Now the show has grown to over 1,200 people in the crowd at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre Centre and the community support is as ardent as ever. The reason? Hasan thinks it makes people feel celebrated.

As our interview draws to a close, a man reaches across our table to dap Phills before leaving into the rain. For a moment I'm invisible, and Phills' pearly smile re-emerges as he shares pleasantries. When I ask who it was Phills answers "barber. 

"Listen man, I'm tapped into the community. If you move from a place where you're thinking about how this will make people feel, you'll be in a better place."

In the 2020s, Canada has generated a new crop of comedic talent, who are using social media to get around the industry's traditional gatekeeper. Black Canadian comedians are taking the internet by storm, turning people's screens into their stage and redefining what Canadian comedy looks and sounds like. This is New Comedy Noir.