As YouTuber Zaid Ali opened his performance Friday night, his question, “Who here is a die-hard fan?” prompted shouts and a sea of raised hands.

The Pakistani-Canadian YouTuber spoke to roughly 500 people at the Muslim-cultural Students Association’s Fall Concert event. Throughout the night, he performed skits and quoted well-known lines from his most popular YouTube videos.

Ali is a third-year student at the University of Waterloo. The 21-year-old is prominent on social media for his videos that use humor to address the relationship between Desi and Western cultures.

After a trip to Pakistan, during which his cousin questioned the profanity on his channel, Ali said he deleted about 15 of his earliest videos. Now, Ali’s content is what he considers to be in line with his religious values and “family friendly.”

“If you guys were to see me, you would never for a second think that was me on there, but that’s how I started,” Ali said of his earliest videos.

This mentality extends beyond his YouTube career. In January 2015, he said he turned down the opportunity to act in a movie because it required he participate in a kissing scene, and pre-marital relations are strictly forbidden in Islam.

Since the reinvention of his YouTube channel and his transition to Facebook, Ali has uploaded dozens of videos and has gone on tour in both Pakistan and the U.K. He gained fame in March 2015 after Bollywood star Sonakshi Sinha retweeted his video titled “When You Use Bollywood Dialogue in Real Life.” His YouTube account has about 400,000 subscribers and more than 47 million views.

Weinberg sophomore and McSA member Hassan Sayed said he connected with Ali “by virtue of being Pakistani.”

Many of Ali’s videos — including “If Brown Parents Gave the ‘Sex Talk’” and “What Brown Parents Hate!” — are premised on poking fun at Desi parents. However, Ali emphasized that parents should be valued and that his videos are intended only for comedic purposes.

“Even though he makes fun of brown parents, it’s important he recognizes it is only a joke,” Sayed said.

The last 30 minutes included a Q&A, in which Ali welcomed his mother on stage for the first time ever during one of his events. She was met with eager applause, and one audience member asked whether she could take a selfie with Ali’s mother after the show.

At first, Ali said, his mother did not want to be in his videos. Now, she is frequently featured and has developed her own online persona as a traditional Desi mother. Ali joked that although it usually takes him two or three takes to film a clip for his videos, his mother requires nearly 100 takes.

Despite a request by McSA to ask questions in English, nearly all of the questions were posed in Urdu. Weinberg senior and McSA Co-President Haaris Pervaiz acknowledged the “unexpected” language barrier during the entire event.

“The exec board overlooked that many of his jokes were meant to be performed in Urdu,” Pervaiz said. “In the future, we want to make sure that events are inclusive to the whole Northwestern community, including all Muslims.”

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