From the small town of Tillsonburg to the big city of Los Angeles, Canadian comedian Debra DiGiovanni has seen it all throughout her career.
DiGiovanni is one of four headliners for the Snowed In Comedy Tour, which will be stopping at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts Saturday, March 26 at 8 p.m.
DiGiovanni will be joined by three other headliners: Dan Quinn, Pete Zedlacher and Paul Myrehaug. While the tour has run for the past 13 years excluding 2021 due to COVID-19, this year marks the first time it will be making stops in Ontario, including Toronto and Collingwood.
“It’s Dan Quinn’s brainchild. He’s a Vancouver boy. He started it because he wanted to just travel with his comic friends and snowboard,” she said.
She said the tour originally started with about eight shows, but this year’s iteration is up to about 60. Each headliner does a 20-minute set, which DiGiovanni says is the perfect amount of time.
“We have so much fun. I love these boys. It’s sort of like a vacation,” she said. “It’s the best of the best. There’s something for everyone.”
DiGiovanni grew up in Tillsonburg, eventually moving to Toronto to go to school. She ventured into comedy in her late 20s.
“I feel like I was always the kind of girl who was making her friends laugh,” said DiGiovanni. “It didn’t really start for me until I moved out of my mom and dad’s house I don’t know if it was the freedom from living on my own, but I had a ‘Now I can be whoever I want,’ kind of vibe.”
“I didn’t think I could do stand-up. It just didn’t seem like a possibility for me. I thought about it for a long time,” she said.
DiGiovanni was a finalist on the fifth season of NBC’s Last Comic Standing Season 7. She received a Gemini for best-televised comedy performance of 2010. She is a regular presence on CBC radio’s The Debaters, and her first recorded stand-up special Single, Awkward Female is now playing on Netflix.
She might be most well-known in Canada as a regular fixture on MuchMusic favourite Video On Trial, where comedians would roast music videos of the day. The show ran from 2003 to 2013.
“It was very bare bones. It was truly me, a camera person and a producer. We did it in a storage room behind the main MuchMusic building. In the summer, it was way too hot, and in the winter it was way too cold. The toilet didn’t work,” she said. “It was super fun and there were very few boundaries on that show.”
DiGiovanni said the show was a “gift” to her comedy career.
“I don’t think any of us had any idea how big it was going to be. Within two years of the show being on the air, it blew up. It’s been off the air since 2013 and people still come up to me to tell me they loved that show,” she said. “I feel very grateful to have been part of that program.”
Currently living in Los Angeles, DiGiovanni found herself pleasantly surprised after moving there to find a kinship with other comedians in the area.
“It’s very friendly and welcoming. Nobody is from here. Everyone is a transplant. There’s a little bit of bonding because of that,” she said. “Growing up in comedy in Toronto, I was completely spoiled. We had such an amazing comedy community.”
She describes her own comedy style as honest and personal.
“It’s sort of like, a page from my diary that I shouldn’t be reading to anybody,” she said. “I don’t have a filter. There has to be a thread of truth for me in order for me to be able to deliver it well. I’m a little frenetic and I have a lot of energy on stage.”
“I love doing comedy and for me, it’s always joyful,” she said.
She says her own favourite comedians include Rory Scovel, Taylor Tomlinson, Nikki Glaser, Jon Dore and Maria Bamford.
Currently, DiGiovanni is one of 10 Canadian comedians featured on the new Amazon Original show Last One Laughing Canada, where she, along with comedian heavyweights such as Caroline Rhea, Colin Mochrie, Dave Foley and Tom Green, are stuck together in a room for six hours trying to make each other laugh.
If you laugh or smile you’re out of the game, and the last comedian standing wins $100,000 for the charity of their choice.
As a comedian, DiGiovanni said she thinks it’s much harder for comedians to not laugh.
“People have this belief that comedians don’t laugh. That is absolutely not true,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of prep, and we shot the show in one day. When I look back, if I could do it over, I would. The entire time I was trying not to laugh rather than trying to make people laugh.”
“If I had the opportunity again, I would have gone in with guns blazing, to see who I could take out before they took me out,” she said. “It was really fun.”
For more information or to purchase tickets, click here.