Baldly going

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This article was published 20/10/2023 (954 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For Abbas Wahab, going bald has been a source of laughter.

The Toronto-based comedian — who brings his Gracefully Balding Tour through Winnipeg next Friday — is particularly adept at teasing the humour out of uncomfortable common experiences and social expectations.

“Balding is typically not a good thing; it’s something you’re supposed to resent,” he says over the phone. “I’m owning my balding … hey, I’m getting older, but maybe I can rock the George Costanza.”

Wahab’s show is about more than his follicular challenges. He also muses unapologetically about his experience emigrating to Canada from Sudan at age six, touring the country as a Black Muslim and giving up a career in engineering to follow his passion for acting and comedy.

“It was rocky,” he says of the latter. “When I first got into it, I was a background actor. I’d be on set for 12 hours and they wouldn’t even use you once; you’d have to go home knowing at no point did the background need you.”

That continued for years until Wahab started landing commercials and minor roles in TV shows, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Boys and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. He’s also become a regular on CBC’s The Debaters and Just for Laughs.

This summer, he spent a month in Scotland performing Gracefully Balding at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

“I lived in a deserted student residence, which was like a haunted house of bad decisions and chlamydia,” he says. “It was also pretty much a bootcamp in drinking — I got my master’s in whisky and single malts.”

Doing an hour-long set daily for a month straight was an intensive way to hone his material. A new audience, with a darker sense of humour, also shifted his perspective on several jokes.

“My dad is a stroke victim and he’s in very poor health,” he says. “When you joke about that here, Canadians are very polite, so you get a lot of people feeling bad, but they loved it in the U.K.

“It made me a lot more comfortable to just speak about my experience instead of worrying about bumming people out … these jokes come from a place of love.”

As Wahab’s career has gained momentum over the last seven years, he’s also found an audience online. He amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok during the pandemic through viral skits featuring an immigrant-dad character based on his own father and a series of sarcastic job interviews that highlight workplace absurdities.

Social media can be a double-edged sword.

“It’s a little stressful because it’s all tied together. If I make a great video, I see ticket sales (to my shows) go up and if I don’t post, ticket sales are not good,” he says. “And not only that, but as soon as you have a platform and people know I’m a Muslim, they know I’m from Sudan, so when all the uprisings are happening in Sudan, I’m getting DMs all the time to use my platform for this.

“Balancing that with the dance of entertaining is a lot — I bit off a lot more than I can chew.”

Wahab was on the roster at the 2020 Winnipeg Comedy Festival and has returned to the city twice for gigs. He’s looking forward to reconvening with what he describes as an enthusiastic crowd.

“I’m excited,” he says of next Friday’s local show. “I like the comedians there. I love doing comedy in the city; there’s this unapologetic laughter there.

“I don’t know what it is — I think it might be the weather.”

Winnipeg comedians Emmanuel Lomuro and Benji Rothman open for Wahab.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @evawasney