D.J. Demers' new half-hour sitcom premiers Jan. 9.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
D.J. Demers, the Canadian comedian, has a bit about the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde feeling he gets when a beautiful woman smiles at him and his two-year-old son. “It’s half wholesome and half something else,” Demers said, grinning toothily, during an interview last month at CBC’s Toronto headquarters. “I’m a bad guy by the end of the joke. But I’ve told jokes earlier in the set that let everyone know how much I love my wife, so they’ll go down that road with me. I like walking that line of acknowledging human duality, while also not being a dick.”
That’s the line Demers, 37 and a genuinely affable guy, has frolicked on throughout his standup career. He kicked into gear in 2014, when on a single night, he won the Homegrown Comics Competition at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal; was tapped to tape his first one-hour TV special (he’s since made two others); and was booked on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show (he went back twice more, and appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon).
It’s also the line he skates in One More Time, his new CBC sitcom (Jan. 9), a feel-good workplace comedy a la Parks and Recreation or Superstore. Demers plays DJ, an ex-hockey player who runs a used sporting goods store in the fictional burg of Korverton, Ont. Though Demers “took seven whole acting classes,” he fake-brags, it’s his first acting gig. So he and his showrunner, Jessie Gabe (Workin’ Moms, Mr. D), stick closely to his real life: A talented amateur hockey player, Demers worked as a teenager at a used sporting goods store in his hometown, Kitchener, Ont. And oh yes, both D.J. and DJ are hard of hearing, which they use to genial, self-deprecating effect.
You might think I buried the lede: The first comedian to use an ASL interpreter on The Tonight Show (he also hires interpreters for his specials and road gigs, when he can afford it) becomes the first hard-of-hearing sitcom lead! But Demers, who’s worn sizable hearing aids since he was four, with an assist from mad lip-reading and body-language skills, has always played down his disability.
Growing up, he never used hearing aid jokes to make his friends laugh. “Though I often wonder – and this isn’t even a joke – if I was getting bullied more than I thought, and I just didn’t hear it,” he says.
When he first started doing standup in 2009, he wouldn’t mention his hearing: “I love comedy, and I didn’t want to have a gimmick or a crutch. I was terrified of being a hack.” Once he got comfortable on stage, however – moving from Toronto to Los Angeles seven years ago, and progressing from open mic nights, corporate gigs, cruise ships and colleges to theatres and C- and B-level clubs – Demers realized there were hearing-related jokes to be mined.
But hearing jokes only work “if the core emotion is relatable,” Demers continues. “So if I talk about how scary it is for me to take my hearing aids out to sleep – because anything could happen – the joke is about the vulnerability I feel. I do a joke about how jealous I’d be if I found out my wife had been with a deaf person before me, especially if they were deafer than me. It’s about not taking myself or the disability too seriously, and being a conduit for funny conversations.”
When Gabe, the showrunner, began working with Demers, she also pushed him to beef up the hearing-related humour. “There are a lot of workplace comedies out there,” she says in a separate interview. “Why not lean into unique stories that not everyone knows about, that we haven’t seen on TV before?” Contemporary comedy has veered into darker, discomfiting territory, “and I love those shows, too,” she adds. “But this one feels almost nostalgic. We’re just going full jokes.”
The season begins on the tamer side – in episode two, DJ sleeps through a burglary, even though the robber steps on bubble wrap, falls against a gong and sets windchimes tinkling – but as things progress, the jokes get riskier. In episode four, DJ dates a “capital-D deaf woman” who only signs, forcing him to pretend he does, too. By episode 10, a review slamming the store for not having more employees with disabilities forces DJ to interview a string of candidates – each of whom is a more vile human being than the last. And in the raunchiest episode, DJ dates a woman who “doesn’t see” his disability, who takes him to a restaurant where patrons dine in pitch-blackness; panicked at the idea of not being able to lip-read, he smuggles in night-vision goggles, which reveal his fellow diners engaged in truly degenerate antics. (“I’m shocked that CBC let us get away with it,” Gabe says.)
The policing of language around disability, the competition to be “the most disabled”: “We’re definitely playing with that,” Demers says. “It’s really ripe for comedy. People have done serious work in advancing the rights of disabled people, but I haven’t worked hard enough at advocacy to call myself one. Any advocacy I’ve done is accidental, just by being in a spotlight with hearing aids. But there are also self-righteous people who aren’t doing any work beyond getting mad. It makes me wonder about the different personas people have online versus real life – like, if the people who are totally fine with the hour of jokes I’ve just told them in person might be the same people at home online writing, ‘You can’t say that.’ There’s fertile ground for humour in the middle.”
Like all comedians, Demers admires Jerry Seinfeld – Seinfeld’s special I’m Telling You for the Last Time, which he watched in Grade 7, made him want to do standup – but “Seinfeld is mean,” Demers says, grinning again. “He’s pure, unadulterated ego. Look what he’s achieved, why wouldn’t he think his way is the right way? But I don’t feel too much kinship with him.”
Instead, Demers cultivates a style that’s actually easier on himself: “I’m not going to the middle of Georgia and doing anti-Republican jokes. I realized early on if the audience liked me, then they’d be more likely to laugh, even at mediocre stuff. It takes pressure off the joke itself. I’ve seen people with poor stage presence tell great jokes and not get the laugh they’re hoping for. So being nice is self-preservation. It’s selfish.”
Niceness, but spiked with a shot of subversiveness – like his new bit about the dad who’s not above using his toddler as a prop. “As a comedian, that’s the best reason to have a baby,” Demers says, straight-faced. “Fresh new material.”
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