Joe White
Comedian & MC
Three years in a row Fringe World Festival best comedy Award winning comedian and recipient of the West Australian newspaper comedy choice award Joe White, formal name is Tilahun Hailu. He is one of six siblings born to Ethiopian parents Yezina and Mulu. Amidst love, heartbreak, failure and success Joe has always tried to find the upside in life and this has been his inspiration for pursuing comedy. He has experienced many hardships in life and this has taught him the value of laughter in life. Now his passion is to make others laugh too.
One of Joe’s career highlights was being chosen to support International comedian Max Amini in 2017/2018 and Maz Jobrani in early 2016/2018. Max and Maz are brilliant stand-up comics from LA, USA. Maz has featured in many films including: The Interpreter, Dragonfly and Friday After Next (alongside Ice Cube & Mike Epps). The tours saw Joe perform to a total crowd of more than 10,000 comedy lovers in four different states around Australia.
In June 2016, Joe White became an ambassador for the Katina Woodruff Children’s Foundation. He is very proud to be one of the ambassadors for this great foundation as it is a cause very close to his heart.
The Katina Woodruff Children’s Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation that works with refugee children coming from countries all over the world including Afghanistan, Iran, China, India, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and many more. The Foundation assists with recovery from traumatic immigration experiences to help these children and their families transition into the Australian way of life. The foundation was set up by Katina Woodruff-Roberts who is a child Anthropologist that has dedicated her whole life to finding new ways to help affected children.
Joe himself first immigrated to Australia 20 years ago as a refugee with his family and he understands the struggles of the transition. Unfortunately, Joe’s father Mulu fell victim to alcoholism and was abusive and at the age of seven years old his father walked out on the family leaving Joe’s mum Yezina to raise him and his siblings. Sadly, they spent many nights homeless and on the streets in war torn Sudan until his mother managed to get them out of the country.
Arriving in Perth at the age of 11 as a refugee, Joe acquired his nickname from his school friends. Later he took the full stage name Joe White when he started performing as a stand-up comedian.