On the coldest night of the year in the heart of Chicago’s January, a small woman in a loose, pink hijab was on stage telling brutally honest and wickedly intelligent jokes about race, religion, gender and more, headlining at Zanies’, a comedy institution, nestled in the city’s Old Town neighborhood. 

The audience was still out, on a weekday no less, in mass, and represented a wide demographic of races, genders, sexual orientations and religions.  

Other women in hijab waited after the hour long set to have a chance to welcome the comedian, Hoodo Hersi, to Chicago and kiki with her a little bit afterward.  

The room had just experienced what the internet and clubs across the country have for years now, a night with the deft and gracious comic and storyteller.  

Born in Canada to Somali parents, Hersi has been performing comedy for over a decade and recently moved to New York to write for a show on Amazon Prime. For over a decade, she has been playing clubs and putting viral clips on the internet, which has helped to increase her audiences both online and in real life.   

Comedy can be polarizing, like anything, these days especially. But comedy has also served as a salve for difficult times and even as a space to create broader understanding between communities in America that might have difficulty speaking to one another.  

Think of the role Dick Gregory played in The Civil Rights Movement or what the country would be without the friendship of Adam Sandler and Chris Rock.  

Comedy can be a space of healing and hilarity, a space for visibility and frankness, and a forum to discuss issues that are otherwise taboo.  

On this night in January, the tension of the headlines and the divisiveness of our democracy, were rolled out, and over, and broken down in bold and approachable ways that made the room feel like a talking to –– from your favorite wise, and slightly embittered, auntie. 

Hoodo Hersi is a sort of intersectional assassin, leaving few topics untouched. She began the night asking where the immigrants were in the room. In a moment where the nature of American composition and right to citizenship is being questioned, she highlighted our “other” placeness.  

All of us come from somewhere else unless we are indigenous to this land. She regaled the audience with personal tales of her own diaspora, and the amusement in the miscues of migration.  

Hersi is a former public-school teacher, and you can tell by her ability to translate and relate complex ideas in a short period of time to as broad of an audience as possible. One of her most memorable bits was breaking down the differences and similarities of the Abrahamic faiths.  

In times, current and historic, where there is tension between communities, one might consider this a noble and more enlightened approach, that perhaps, we might be able to use laughter as a tool to bring some of our more fundamental brethren together.  

After October 7, Hersi united with a Jewish comedian and began to perform in synagogues.  

There was a power for her in the immediacy of seeing people wrestle, grieve and care for each other in the uncertainty of the moment. And there was also a profound importance in those congregations, hearing from a woman, demonized and dehumanized, by other media sources, live and direct, and in communion with them, in their place of worship. 

Some might argue American race relations were stalled because of the Rat Pack, and some might argue Don Rickles and Sammy Davis Jr., knew enough about the other, well enough, with any familial type of love and adoration, to poke fun and laugh at the absurdity of stereotypes and Jim Crow. There is a knowing poking that Hersi does in her sets that seems to be urging and pleading the country forward.  

Authentically, Hersi is part Joan Rivers, part Issa Rae. Confident and self-deprecating, familiar and aspirational. She is a student of the genre and linages and legacies she inherits and innovates within. 

A bridgebuilder between communities of faith and pop culture, spanning haram and halal.  

She is working on a bit, and maybe a whole hour, about code switching, about the fluidity between pliable vernaculars and identities, something Black folks, and immigrants of all kinds, have navigated historically.  

Her set, and multiple identities and expressions of faith, and faiths, leaves you with the impression that the power and resolve might come from the liminal, from the in between. 

That in the cracks, in the unexpected, the evolving and constant negotiations between nations and nationalities, the most common experience is that of the individual and community in the middle or between the imagined firm states of being and origin.

It seems, perhaps, that Hersi is arguing that the insight, the eyes and perspective, are most profound and prominent from the margins, which is truly the where the many dwells, and where she makes an audience and fan of us all.