Charlie Demers recalls being the good-hearted class clown at Burnaby Central Secondary

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON FEB. 16, 2022

By Steve Newton

Charlie Demers didn’t waste any time at all getting known for his comedy chops. When he was two weeks old his mom described him in her baby journal as “the little comedian” because he peed on the doctor.

“Obviously, it takes a certain kinda family to interpret that kind of thing as comedy,” says Demers from his home near Trout Lake, “but it quite literally has been a part of my identity ever since. As a kid I watched comedy movies and comedy on TV, and as a teenager I was right in that time when there was a lot of that inexpensive programming on A&E like Caroline’s Comedy Hour or An Evening at the Improv, so you could watch standups all the time. So it’s always been a big part of my life.”

Not surprisingly, by the time he was attending Burnaby Central Secondary School, Demers’ chucklesome antics had earned him the label of class clown.

“There are sort of two versions of the class clown,” he points out. “There’s kind of the mean-streak class clown, and I was always the kind of good-hearted class clown, and teachers liked me even though I was a handful in the class. I was voted the funniest person in my yearbook in grade 12, so when I became a comedian nobody was shocked. It was pretty much in keeping with what everybody expected.”

Inspired by the likes of John Candy, Charlie Chaplin, and Richard Pryor, Demers followed his comedy dreams to the point where he has opened shows for such heavyweights as Sarah Silverman, Marc Maron, Bob Odenkirk, and Hannibal Buress. He’s been booked to provide the laughs at an online fundraiser for WORD Vancouver titled Nourished: Cooking, Comedy & Compassion, which will see him top off a night that includes cooking with Vikram Vij and a conversation on compassion led by Dr. Gabor Maté.

“Cooking and comedy are probably on the same plane,” says Demers when asked where he thinks comedy ranks among the three topics, “and then I think compassion is more of an ultimate idea that hopefully involves both of them. I would think cooking and comedy are a way of showing compassion, both to ourselves and others.”

Demers’ comedic talents were acknowledged nationally when, in 2018, the Juno Awards brought back the Comedy Album of the Year award, which hadn’t been presented since Bob and Doug McKenzie won it for Strange Brew back in 1984. Demers’ 2017 album, Fatherland, was nominated, but lost out to fellow Vancouver comic Ivan Decker’s I Wanted To Be a Dinosaur.

“Ivan’s a really, really close friend,” says Demers, “and if you’re competing with a friend for something, you always hope that you’ll have the awkward job of having to be the gracious winner as opposed to the awkward job of having to be the gracious loser. I got stuck with the awkward job of being the gracious loser, but if I had to lose, I mean there’s nobody I’d rather lose to. He’s an incredibly, incredibly funny standup.”

Ivan Decker isn’t the only local comedian that Demers is quick to pile compliments on, though.

“I think Andrea Jin is a really smart and funny up-and-comer,” he says. “You know, she’s so new to comedy in a relative way, and yet she just sounds like nobody else–she sounds like herself. And Jacob Samuel is just terrific. There are so many people that make me laugh.”

Despite his enthusiasm for the performers on the local comedy scene, Demers is aware that the recent shuttering of popular venues like the artist-run Little Mountain Gallery have put a damper on things.

“The scene is kind of floundering,” he admits, “in the sense that we don’t have any comedy clubs in the city anymore. Yuk Yuk’s is gone, and the Comedy Mix is gone. We’re hoping that that changes pretty soon, but for a city with no standing comedy club at the moment, it really is a remarkable place.”

Besides making a name for himself as a comedian, Demers is an accomplished writer. He is the co-author, with Canada’s first Poet Laureate George Bowering, of The Dad Dialogues, a collection of epistolary non-fiction on fatherhood. He’s also written two novels, 2018’s Property Values and 2020’s Primary Obsessions, the former having been optioned for development as a feature film by L.A.’s Pioneer Pictures, with a screenplay cowritten by Demers.

His third novel, Noonday Dark, is scheduled for release on May 8, and continues the series started in Primary Obsessions, which centres around Dr. Annick Boudreau, a psychologist and amateur sleuth loosely based on the real-life cognitive behavioural therapist Demers has seen for many years.

“My plan with the series is to do a book centred loosely on a mental-health theme each time,” he explains. “And so the first book, Primary Obsessions, was sort of based around OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and [Noonday Dark] is a story about depression, with the plot kind of centred around a Vancouver civic-politics story.”

When he isn’t cracking jokes or writing novels, Demers also works as a voice actor, having lent his talents to the animated Netflix children’s shows Beat Bugs and The Last Kids on Earth. He is also known as a political activist, which makes one wonder whether the big political story of the day–the Canadian trucker protests–might become fodder for his next standup routine.

“We’ll see!,” he replies. “I mean, it’s funny, I was in Winnipeg working the Rumor’s comedy club during the first week of the truckers protest, and every night my emcees–like the opening act–they would try and joke about the truckers, because it’s this unavoidable topic. And every night it was very thorny, because it’s not clear, actually, where a lot of the audience was sitting on what’s going on. So I’m still sort of figuring out how to talk about it.

“But that’s one of the great things about standup comedy and that relationship between a comic and a crowd. When you’re in a room with people during a show, and once you start making them laugh–once they trust that you’re funny–then you can get to a place where you’re allowed to start talking about stuff that you’re still trying to sort out. And hopefully by the end of the show you all get to a bit more clarity, together.”