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comedy

The offbeat New York comedian Demetri Martin, who starred in his own Comedy Central series Important Things with Demetri Martin, tours Canada as part of his Telling Jokes in Cold Places 2012 Tour. Who are the fans of his live drawings, incidental guitar strumming and stream-of-consciousness narratives? Martin's given it considerable thought.

For your tour, you're hosting a contest (at demetrimartin.com) in which fans can win backstage passes. Is it like the scene in Wayne's World, with the different levels of backstage access?

For me, there's only one level. It's going to be me and my opening act. They'll come backstage and we'll be sitting there with some snacks. That's about it.

Have you done much of this kind of thing before?

When I first started doing bigger rooms on the road, I started doing meet-and-greets. But after a certain size audience, you reach a diminishing return. I was there meeting people for longer than the performance itself.

What are your fans like, the ones you meet?

I genuinely think I've liked 95 per cent of the people that I've met after my shows. I often think that they could have been my friends, if I was that person's age and I lived in their town. Or if we were in college, they could be one of my roommates.

Are they a reflection of you?

You find overlaps in personality. Of course, I'm basing this on very short interactions with people. But I don't usually find that I meet people after my shows who seem like the kind of person who beat me up in high school, or tried to.

Were the crowds different at the beginning of your career?

I started in 1997, in New York City, playing in the Village. It was difficult to get stage time, other than open-mics. But the majority of stage time I was able to get, where I could develop my act, was in what we called alternative rooms. There was a room behind the lobby of the Gershwin Hotel. In those rooms, you're often playing to other comedians.

There are non-comedians who are hilarious. What separates the funny layman from a performing comic?

For people who aren't trying to make comedy or to get an audience to laugh, when they say something is funny, it's an absolute – "that's funny," and that's the end of the sentence. But once you're a comedian, there's an extra little thing that comes at the end of the sentence. Is it funny to the club crowd on a Friday night? Is that funny to a reader of The New Yorker, or is that funny to a drunk college crowd? There's a cognizance for "who's my audience? Why am I doing this? This is funny to whom?"

It sounds like comedians consider their audiences more than, say, a musician would.

It's a different degree. A comedian gets very clear feedback, especially if they're joke-tellers. There's specific endpoint, where people either laugh or they don't. But at the end of the day, I'm trying to find out what I think is funny. The second thing is, is it funny to other people.

Is the third thing, will they like me enough to want to meet me after the show?

I guess the third thing is, are there enough of them where I can make a living. But if you let that last thing lead the first thing too much, it's a slippery slope and you probably end up feeling pretty empty. It's a delicate little dance.

Demitri Martin plays Edmonton, Jan. 5; Calgary, Jan. 6; Vancouver, Jan. 7; Montreal, Jan. 12; Toronto, Jan. 13; and Ottawa, Jan. 14.

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