The HaHa Report: Hasaan Hates Portland
Almost Live! and Portlandia: two sketch comedy shows which expertly skewered Pacific Northwest stereotypes and culture, made national acclaim, and proved to the masses that there are more jokes to be made about Seattle and Portland than “we like coffee!” and “oh look, there’s rain”.
Loyal fans love these shows for depicting a heightened yet accurate look at living here, such as in sketches like “How Seattle Are You?”, “Colin the Chicken”, “Ballard Driving School”, and “Battle of the Gentle Bands”. Avid binge-watchers of these shows, however, might find themselves wondering…Where are all the Black people?
Mischa Webley wondered the same.
I sat down with Webley, writer and director of the smash-hit web series “Hasaan Hates Portland”—a dark comedy portraying the awkwardness and bizarre experience of being Black in the Pacific Northwest.
When asked what inspired the series to be sketch comedy, Webley said,“‘Hasaan Hates Portland’ has been a long time coming. I know I've been wanting to capture the specific experience of being Black in a place like Portland or the Northwest. A lot of the experience is dark, but there's something really funny about it and absurd.”
This is Webley’s first sketch series; previous works include grittier films like “Metal” starring William Earl Ray, and “The Kill Hole” starring Chadwick Boseman.
“There's always been a disconnect between the image Portland puts out about itself and my experience of it, and the experience of a lot of Black people I know. I felt that way about some of the sketches in “Portlandia”. I didn’t recognize the city they were living in, and I didn't know what they were talking about. And also kind of personally, whatever the image [was], there weren't a lot of Black people in it. It's just an incomplete picture.”
Meme from “Hasaan Hates Portland”’s Instagram
In episode 2, “Hasaan Hates Getting Coffee”, our protagonist enters a coffee shop asking for a medium latte; when handing over his card, he’s told it’s “reparations happy hour”, and there’s no need to pay. The stilted virtue signaling is met with an uncomfortably familiar side eye from starring actor Hasaan Thomas.
“The first day I met Hasaan Thomas, which was almost 10 years ago now, he was working at a coffee shop, I walked in there, and we immediately began talking. Eventually I asked, ‘Have you ever been on screen before?’ And he was like, nah, nah. I'm like, ‘Well, you should be, it just seemed kind of obvious to me.’ We became friends, really tight after that, and I just kind of always bugged him. I'm like, you should, you should act like this is, you know, it just seems clear. So I joke with him now that, like, it took me making him the star and putting his name in the title to make it happen. He carries all of it. He doesn't say a lot in the show, and he doesn't need to. It’s all right there, in his demeanor.”
I first came across the series one day when scrolling TikTok two months ago; now the series has grown to an audience of 24.3k on TikTok and 49.4k on Instagram.
Top comments include:
“Always gotta stop scrolling to watch the new HHP.”
“This Show IS Portland.”
