Vancouver-based comedian Niki Mohrdar is debuting a new show at this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival. “Sanction Me, Daddy”enjoyed its first showing at Little Mountain Gallery Sept. 11 and 12, and will have two more showings Sept.18 – 20.

“Sanction Me, Daddy” marks Mohrdar’s first solo show, with all showings currently sold out. The Sept. 18 show will see opening acts from Pariya Zabihi and Julya van der Sloot, with the Sept. 20 show opened by Patricia Masur and Zawer Sulaiman

Laughing about dating

The show sees Mohrdar examine how immigrant experiences can influence people’s romantic lives and who they choose to love through a blend of stand-up, storytelling and cultural critique.

“I’ve always felt inspired to speak about my experiences as an Iranian woman, my upbringing as an immigrant, and my position as a Middle Eastern woman dating in Canada,” says Mohrdar.

Mohrdar, who grew up as a first-generation Iranian immigrant in Canada, traces the ways whiteness and racialization shaped her understanding of attraction, from falling for white boys, to losing herself in the process, and ultimately finding her way back.

Mohrdar points out that the show is “a culmination of all of [her] favourite jokes” from the past five years that she hopes will give the audience a sense of who she is.

“A lot of this material has been collected and refined over that time,” she adds. “There’s about 15 new minutes in there that I wrote over the last month and worked out in rooms across the city.”

Connection through comedy

A stand-up comedian with five years under her belt, Mohrdar has previously been featured at Just For Laughs Vancouver, as well as CBC’s New Wave of Stand Up, OutTV’s Killjoy, Season 2 of YVR Funny, Comedy Here Often, and the South Rock Comedy Festival. She was also a judge at the 2026 Vancouver Sketchfest this past February and was a co-host of the Soft For Us podcast, which was a finalist for Best Podcast in Georgia Straight’s 2024 Best of Vancouver list.

Mohrdar says she wrote the show for the Fringe Festival to “give [herself] a writing deadline.”

“So much of writing for me is not-writing,” says Mohrdar. “But I needed to have a fire lit underneath me so that I could sit down, focus, and make jokes out of topics that some might not initially think are funny.”

From Fringe, the comedian hopes to continue to perform and refine the jokes from “Sanction Me, Daddy” at other shows across Canada over the next year, Above all else, however, she says wants people to laugh.

“This show touches on serious topics and is in many ways incredibly vulnerable,” says Mohrdar. “But my job as a stand-up comedian is to bring people into these topics through laughter and levity. You might see a piece of yourself in this show, or you might just feel like you understand someone else in your life or in your community.”

For more information, go to https://www.vancouverfringe.com/events/sanction-me/ or follow Niki on Instagram at @niki.mohrdar