Hoodo Hersi tells her truth in the funniest way possible

When Hoodo Hersi performed at her first open mic at Yuk Yuk's Ottawa at age 19, she didn't know anyone in the crowd, and she didn't care if she flopped. 

Hersi wasn't looking for fame. She just wanted to get onstage and tell her truth in the funniest way possible, a goal she first developed while watching Chappelle's Show when she was in high school.

"We're all going to be dead one day. We're all going to get sick, we're all gonna die," Hersi told CBC Arts. "This life is one take only. There's no second run. So we've got to make sure we're just doing the things we want to do."

Hersi has embraced that ethos for over a decade. As a Black, Muslim woman who, for years, balanced her comedy career with a day job as a suburban public school teacher, she's developed a perspective that resonates with many — but that few have had the opportunity to express onstage.

"I just think racism is so traumatizing," she said. "People don't talk enough about the psychological impact of racism." 

She uses comedy to help her process that trauma.

"[Teaching] is a brutal job," she said. "And then the racism that you have to deal with when you're a Black teacher is insane. It's a job that definitely shaves years off of your life." 

Incisive and witty commentary about race and mental health mixed with political and pop cultural hot takes has become Hersi's comedic brand. That's how she's been able to turn incidents like her mother getting yelled at to "go back to where [she] came from" into one of her standout jokes. The bizarre and sometimes insidious situations she or her mother have found themselves in have become her fuel.

"In white people terms, it's the way Taylor Swift breaks up with a guy: A guy does her dirty, she writes a song about it and then makes so much money off of it," Hersi said. "Racists hurt my feelings, they do terrible things, and then I write a joke about them and then I make money off of them. That's the capitalist cycle of life."

That cycle is how she's amassed over 100,000 followers on Instagram and over 170,000 followers on TikTok. During the pandemic, many comedians started to rely on their recorded crowd work or cannibalizing their sets to build a following. Instead, Hersi atomized her biting racial and political commentary to riff on daily news. As politics has become more polarized, it's only made her takes sharper. And as pundits have become more pointed, her takes have become a soothing balm to heal the damage done. 

"I think I was always political," said Hersi. "We're living through some crazy, crazy times, so it's just a way to cope with how traumatic the world is right now."

"I've gotten some messages online [from] people being like, 'Oh, I love your takes.' It makes me feel less crazy for thinking the way that I think."

That growing online presence has helped push Hersi up the comedy ladder, leading to appearances on CBC's The New Wave of Standup and at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal. It's also propelled her out of Toronto and into New York's comedy scene, starting with a set on Late Night with Seth Meyers.

"I didn't even tell a lot of people [in Toronto] I was moving," she said. "I told my close friends, but a lot of people just found out just by seeing me on Seth Meyers, which I think is a great way to move."

Like so many great Canadian comedians before her, Hersi — who is now writing for an upcoming Amazon Prime Video series — felt a move to the States was necessary if she wanted to keep growing her career. Having the opportunity to create a new TV series is rare in Canada, and rarer still for Black and brown people.

"If you just look at America, you look at TV, the shows that are popping — [you have] someone like Donald Glover with Atlanta or Ramy [Youssef] with his Hulu show, Ramy," said Hersi. "Or Abbott Elementary. Or Issa Rae with Insecure. That show won a bunch of awards and stuff, and had all this critical acclaim. We don't really have a version of that in Canada."

Hersi has also taken content creation into her own hands with her upcoming pop culture podcast, Two Dumb Questions, alongside Toronto comedian Leonard Chan. The two aim to create a hilarious intergenerational exchange between millennials and their uncles, Gen X.

"We ask each other two dumb questions. I'll ask him a question about bitcoin, and then he'll ask me a question about astrology. And the connection with those two topics is that a lot of bitcoin investors use astrologers," Hersi said.

"He talks about home ownership, like Home Ownership 101, and then I talk about the Real Housewives."

Despite Hersi's consistent comedic expansion, there is a limit to the number of projects she plans to take on. While comedic world domination à la Kevin Hart can be enticing — with its constant movies, commercials, TV show appearances, music video roles and podcast-hosting gigs — the stage will always be home for Hersi. In fact, a new comedy hour is on the way.

"All roads lead back to standup — everything's for standup," she said. 

"If I wanted to save the world, I would have stayed in teaching, you know?"