Usama Siddiquee is on Variety's Comics to Watch list. Thursday he hits Times Square.

Usama Siddiquee is on Variety's 10 Comics to Watch list for 2026. The Bengali American comic, raised in Plano, Texas by Bangladeshi parents, performs with the rest of the class Thursday, November 12, at the New York Comedy Festival showcase at Hard Rock Hotel New York in Times Square. Hasan Minhaj wrote his tribute. The list published November 4. The set is two days away.

He almost never took this job. Siddiquee was one day from starting medical school at Texas A&M when he walked away and chose comedy. His first open mic was August 27, 2011, at Hyena's Comedy Club in Dallas. Fellow comic Nimesh Patel talked him into five minutes of Osama bin Laden puns. He killed, then bombed for months, then kept showing up. Just for Laughs put him on the New Faces list in Montreal in 2018. New York's Comedy Cellar passed him soon after. He did BET's 50 Central, America's Got Talent in 2020, and a late-night debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on February 5, 2024. For a long stretch he was a club regular people in the room knew and Netflix viewers did not.

That changed this spring. Siddiquee finished runner-up on Kevin Hart's Netflix competition Funny AF. Ron Taylor won the Netflix special. Videos from the finale taping show crowds chanting Siddiquee's name before he walked out. He has said the show flipped his ticket sales: he was already a headliner who struggled to fill rooms, and after the finale the dates sold out. WME signed him the same month for touring, television, film, and digital. Levity still manages him. His first half-hour, Usama Bin Laughin', came out through Don't Tell Comedy in 2025. The material stays close to home: growing up Muslim in Texas, immigrant parents, dating, the family jokes that land with other immigrant crowds too.

He also acts. He has turned up in Netflix's Inventing Anna and Survival of the Thickest, HBO's And Just Like That…, Comedy Central's Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, FX's Better Things, and Netflix's Best of the Best, the Bollywood-fusion campus comedy from Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Thursday is not his introduction to New York. It is Variety putting him on a festival stage the industry already watches. Goldsea covered his Funny AF run if you want that season in one place.