The Internet has become the fuel for many entertainers to rocket to fame.

No one exemplifies this more than Jon Lajoie, the Montreal-born comedian-musician who went from buying a low-quality camera to making comedy videos in his basement to a tour of L.A. looking for representation and listening to offers, to finally landing a role on a new series on cable channel FX.

“If I think about it that kind of stuff, I’ll go, ‘Oh, what the hell’ and start getting nervous,” says Lajoie, taking a break from his first North American tour, calling between dates in Iowa and Houston. “I just kind of go, ‘This is the situation now, deal with it, make sure you’re good, make sure you do everything right.’ Then keep moving on. It’s absolutely insane if I think where I was two years ago to where I am today.”

Two years ago, Lajoie’s role on the popular Quebecois series, L’auberge du chien noir, ended after a five-year stint. To add to his woes his band had just broken up too. For a Canadian performer who grew up watching Kids in the Hall, the next step seemed logical: go into comedy. So he got a handheld camera and started posting videos on the Internet and quickly realized the medium’s potential for fast and free exposure.

“My first videos are just me talking to a camera or beside a camera and giving a bit of a context. And just kind of being silly and writing silly things and then editing it together, all one angle, one shot. . . . They’re not by any means good videos at all because I didn’t know how to put together a video; it was just me being, ‘I want to do comedy, I want to do this in Montreal.’”

Lajoie collected 5,000 views on those first few posted videos but the initial efforts were marked by poor technical quality, both video and audio. Soon Lajoie integrated his music ability into his comedy and realized that if he pre-recorded a song, he could sync it up later and have much-improved sound quality.

“I never really wanted to be a musical comedian at all, the idea came to me because my video equipment was so cheap that audio was really hard to capture well and make it sound good,” he says. “But being in a band, I knew how to record music, and I thought, ‘Oh, if I just write a song and then pre-record all the audio, then I just have to take images with my camera and not have to worry about the crappy audio coming out of it.’”

Lajoie recorded High as Fuck, a sweet ballad about the trials and tribulations of being incredibly high. Suddenly it was reposted on Ebaum’s World and Break and in 2007 the views started coming in 100,000 chunks. Fast forward to 2009 and Lajoie now has over 300,000 subscribers on Youtube alone.

“When you’re making these things, you’re never expecting more than 500 people or your friends and family to watch them. When that starts happening, it’s a shock. At the same time, it’s just a number on your computer screen,” he says. “You don’t realize that those are actual people watching. You’re just like, ‘Oh okay, that’s cool, I got a high score on a test.’”

Lajoie started realizing the reach his videos had when people started recognizing him on the streets of Montreal not for his role on L’auberge, but instead for Two Girls, One Cup Song and Everyday Normal Guy. Soon people began contacting him, asking if he had an agent or to appear at the Just For Laughs festival, where he put together his first live comedy show in the summer of 2008, just one year after that initial camera purchase.

He ran with it, made a trip to L.A. and scheduled a pile of meetings, including some with Jackie Marcus and Jeff Schaffer (who previously worked on Curb Your Enthusiasm) about a potential show.

“They were kind of explaining it to me, ‘We have this character Taco, who’s a bit of a stoner, a bit in his own world, kind of the Kramer character, comes in and out, says weird things. . . and he’s a musician too, this and that, and we want you to do it.’ And at this point, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s great, I’m flattered.’”

But, as Lajoie points out, L.A. is a town of false flattery. Naturally, he was skeptical.

“When you get to L.A., it’s like, ‘Oh, you, we love you, we wanna put you in this, in that,’ everyone’s, like, blowing smoke up your ass,” he says. “So you never know what’s real and what’s not. That was one of the things that I was like, ‘Yeah, that’d be cool, fine, whatever, I’m not going to sit here and cross my fingers.’ About a year after that first meeting, I was on the set, shooting the pilot and I was like, ‘Wow.’”

The League, is wrapping up its first season on FX and will likely be licensed and run on a Canadian station sometime in the future. However, Lajoie, who is no stranger to releasing his content for free, suggested that if Canadians want to check it out it is there on the Internet to watch. Using the Internet’s vast capacity for duplication has worked out well so far, he says that without initially giving away all of his content for free, through his website and through Youtube, he likely would never have gotten his role on The League.

“Things spread when they’re free and if you’re not dying, it doesn’t matter. Like Metallica bitching because people are downloading their music for free.” ‘Yeah, but you guys don’t need any more money. You’re touring, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. Give a little bit’, you know? . . . I guess that’s what happens when you’re a Canadian artist. You realize that the important thing is you’re paying your rent and you can get by, it’s just a privilege to be an artist.”

So far, Canada has accepted its Youtube celebrity with open arms. Show Me Your Genitals is the second most-viewed Canadian video of all time and the first in the comedy category, as well as being one of the top videos on all of Youtube. He’s is also watching high scores on his videos turn into actual bodies at sold-out shows across the country, including a set in Calgary on December 19^th at MacEwan Hall on the University of Calgary campus, on a tour that was delayed so he could film The League.

For Lajoie though, as a Canadian kid growing up watching Kids in the Hall, even without the sold-out shows, the tour and the TV show, he can die happy now after meeting his idols. The Kids’ Dave Foley’s daughter is on The League and Foley hangs around on set.

“I ran into some of the other Kids in the Hall and they’ve been at some of my shows,” he says. “And then I came out and we’d hang out and have beers together, hang out in Vegas with the Kids in the Hall. I have lived and I’ll be very happy if I died tomorrow because I hung out with the Kids in the Hall and I was quoting their shit to them and they were laughing and going, ‘I can’t believe you remember that.’”

The following videos are some of Lajoie's most popular. He offers insight into the creation of the concepts.

Lajoie on “Stay At Home Dad”

“Little Dylan. He’s probably about a month old at that point and I was really like, selfish in my mind. But also I had a few buddies who were stay at home dads. I was like, hmmm, I have an extra person that I can use in my video. How can I use a baby in a video? I was like, okay, I’ll do this and it was based on a few of my friends lives mixed together. They liked Rage Against the Machine and all that stuff. So I thought it was kind of a funny combo, a stay-at-home dad who likes Pantera and Rage Against the Machine it was just a funny kind of image. And at the same time I wanted to be able to play one song, or one of my videos, I wanted my mom to be able to watch one without cringing at swear words or me dropping an F or a P bomb. I was really conscious - it was a baby, first of all, so I’m not going to get dirty and swear. And second of all, I wanted one video so that my mom could go, this is what my son does because I kept telling her, just don’t watch it, don’t watch it. She’d watch a few and go, uh, alright. But I wanted one for her to go, oh, everyone, this is what Jon does.

…

It was actually really good. Yeah, at one point, he’s in a bath and I don’t think babies really necessarily enjoy the bath. I don’t know, I don’t even know. But, no, I’m good with babies. I have six younger siblings; I’m used to having babies around. He wasn’t under distress, he was alright.”

Lajoie on “Show Me Your Genitals”

“The ‘Show Me Your Genitals,’ I have to say, is just the funnest to do because it’s so ridiculous. It’s so wrong and it’s so extremely terrible. All of that, it’s really fun to do and to write. ‘Show Me Your Genitals’ has something like 20 million views. Never in a million years. When I was writing it, the whole idea behind that was I was going to work out at the gym and I kept hearing - I don’t know who was playing the music - the most horribly sexist songs like objectifying – and not even ashamed of it. . . . I thought that it was just so hilarious that you can be sexist in a song and it doesn’t matter because it’s a song.

…

I thought it was so funny that I was like, alright, I’m going to one-up this and just go out and say it. Of course the guy’s not going to be the coolest guy in the world. Yeah, this is the stupid, this is kind of silly. And I’m going to get this little outfit and do a little dance. And never in a million years did I think that was going to be the one that people responded to the most. A lot of people responded to it for the wrong reasons and I very much understand that. But a lot of people don’t. I’ve received e-mails from several feminist groups applauding me, applauding me. ‘Oh, that’s a really original take on sexism in the media’ and this and that. I was like, oh, cool, they got it. Then I get e-mails from feminist groups saying that I should die and burn in hell for the things that I’m saying. I understand that at least five million of those views are from people who are like, ‘Yeah, that’s how I think about women.’

…

Hey, you gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet, if you know what I mean.”

On his earlier videos, including “Saturday Night Webcam Party”, his second

“I always try to up it a little bit in quality in everything. When I go back to my early videos and I watch the videos – not so much the content, but more the video itself – the video, sometimes I go back and watch my old stuff and I go like, oh I could’ve colour corrected it here, put in another shot here. Because I was learning the entire time I was making the videos. A lot of the early ones I’m like, ignore those because they don’t look very good.

…

One of the videos I really like is the one called “Life Lessons”, which I mention to people and they don’t even know it’s one of my videos.

…

I didn’t take off any of my first ones, but those are always the ones that I go ‘oh, people are going to watch these and think I suck.’

…

It would be impossible to get rid of, but there’s nothing on there that I think ‘oh, I wish I could take this off.’ It’s just really comes in terms of quality of video, I don’t want somebody to watch like Matthew Desp’s Saturday Night Webcam Party and go, ‘this is what my friend’s telling me about? This is terrible.’ As long as they watch that one after they watch a lot of my other stuff, then it’s not so bad. But you know, what are you going to do.”

       

Written by :

M.D. Shorter