Ava Val has heard enough performative allyship since coming out as a trans woman in her thirties. “If I get one more ‘Yasss Queen!’ while I’m picking a wedgie in a park, I’m detransitioning,” the Toronto comedian jokes in So Brave, her gut-busting debut comedy special. “I love your support, but fuck! Being called brave in public is not the compliment you think it is.”
Val’s stand-up shows are earning plenty of compliments of their own these days: The 36-year-old Drag Heals star and former This Hour Has 22 Minutes writer might well be one of Canada’s funniest touring comics. After appearing on CBC’s The New Wave of Standup and at Just For Laughs, San Francisco’s Sketchfest and the Ha!ifax Comedy Fest, she returns to Halifax next month for her first headlining show in the city. And with a transphobic Trump administration south of the Canada-US border spurring renewed debate about gender identity and sexual orientation, her message couldn’t be timelier.
“I was just never ready until I was ready”
Though Ava might be a fresh face on the Canadian comedy circuit, she’s far from a novice act. Val had been performing stand-up for more than a decade before she transitioned to living as a woman—a change she made just before the COVID-19 pandemic put live performances on hold. A graduate of The Second City’s famed conservatory program, Val caught the comedy bug as an 18-year-old psychology major at Western University in London, Ont. There, she joined an improv group and did her first open mic at a bar and grill at the Galleria Mall. The contest, she says, was to find “London’s Funniest Person.”
“I was far from it at the time,” Val jokes. “I think I got one chuckle, and I was hooked.”
A gifted impressionist with a Jim Carrey-esque love for over-the-top, physical comedy, Val grew up idolizing another high-energy comedian: Dane Cook. As a preteen in Toronto, she would listen to Cook’s 2005 album Retaliation and marvel at how he could have an audience hanging on every word. The comedy album went double-platinum in the US and propelled the Boston comic to become one of the biggest stand-up acts in the world. The “energy in that album was, to me, exceptional,” Val recalls. “It was just explosive, and it was contagious.”
The alpha-male persona Cook portrayed also offered Val something else at the time: a cover that, as she wrestled with her identity, she sought to hide herself in.
“I saw the Dane Cook life—the guys’ guy, the cool dude—and in my mind, I had compartmentalized this gender identity that I was struggling with,” Val tells The Coast. “I was like, ‘I’m just going to take this to my grave, and I’m gonna live and die as the cool dude, rockstar comedian.’ And that really, obviously, wasn’t working for me.”
It was in part thanks to another comedian, Suzy Izzard, that Val found confidence in embracing the side of herself she’d kept hidden. The renowned British comedian and actor—born Eddie Izzard—started wearing makeup and dresses in the 1980s, calling herself gender-fluid decades before taking on she/her pronouns in 2020 and saying she wants “to be based in girl mode from now on.” Val “loved” Izzard’s stream-of-consciousness comedy as a teen.
“And so her influence was always kind of in the back of my mind—that you could, if you wanted to, take ownership of all parts of yourself and really make it work and be embraced,” Val says. “But I was just never ready until I was ready. And that’s the thing about transitioning.”
Val took the plunge in 2020, starting hormone replacement therapy the following year. She counts herself “incredibly fortunate” that Toronto’s stand-up community is a “very welcoming” one.
“They embraced all the changes that I was going through, and so did I—up to a point,” she says. “I had to work through a lot of shame in the beginning, but stand-up was therapy for me, and it was this mutual experience of me working things out onstage and having my insecurities and my triumphs and failures affirmed by the audience.”
These days, Val doesn’t shy away from talking about trans issues onstage. She confronts them head-on. And given the state of discourse around trans lives in Canada, the US and elsewhere, it’s a breath of fresh air.
“There’s so much to say”
A month ago, Glitter Bean Café’s morning crew arrived to find a message scrawled in Sharpie on the side of the Spring Garden Road building: “This business supports child grooming.” Barrington Street bookstore and sex shop Venus Envy’s workers found a similar message scrawled on their storefront in February—twice. And then earlier this month, someone spray-painted the shop’s front window. “Pedo Filth,” the message read.
The trans- and queerphobic acts of vandalism come at a time when, south of the Canada-US border, president and tax fraud Donald Trump’s second administration is threatening trans folks’ ability to secure work and travel visas. A recent leaked memo from US secretary of state Marco Rubio instructed consulate officials that “all visas must reflect an applicant’s sex at birth,” and if there is a “discrepancy” in “the applicant’s documents or in electronic consular records,” or “if other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicant’s sex,” those officials “should refuse the case.” The move has already led Val to cancel a pair of Massachusetts shows. Prior to Trump’s presidency, she had been planning a permanent move to New York. That now hangs in the lurch.
Neither Trump’s visa veto nor the vandals targeting Venus Envy and Glitter Bean are isolated incidents. In 2023, several students burned a Pride flag at Tantallon’s Bay View High School. Last June, a same-sex couple was attacked on Argyle Street and taunted with homophobic slurs. (Halifax police arrested and charged two adults and three teens last week in connection to the attack.)
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In her stand-up act, Val cuts to the core of the scrutiny LGBTQ+ folks so commonly face, whether taking aim at the “groomer” narrative or the endless obsession with which bathrooms trans folks should use.
“God, the bathroom debate is fucking exhausting, man,” she jokes in So Brave. “We all just want to take a shit in peace. That’s the trans agenda.”
Val doesn’t mind turning off some audience members who think “all Ava talks about is the trans thing.” To that, she says, “Yeah, of course. I mean, I’m going through these massive changes… and we are an actively persecuted, discriminated-against group of people… There’s so much to say.”
Performance at Halifax Live Comedy Club
Val returns to Halifax as part of the Gay AF Comedy Tour with Canadian Comedy Award winner Robert Watson. The two will perform at the Halifax Live Comedy Club on Friday, April 11. The show starts at 8pm. Tickets are available online for $32.
Even if you’ve seen Val’s comedy before, she says, you can expect something new.
“Every one of my shows is different from the last,” she adds. “I love to improvise a lot. I love playing with the audience and with the scenery.”
Val says she’s “really excited” to return to Halifax after performing at Ha!ifax Comedy Fest last May, where she debuted her new stage name. There are big things on her horizon, too: Val appears on this season of Canada’s Got Talent. She also taped another comedy special.
For now, she’s looking forward to another Halifax crowd in the near future, where she promises a “playful” time at her show.
“You’re gonna leave feeling nice and warm in your tumtum.”
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2025.
