Jeff Leeson has been doing stand up comedy since he was fourteen years old and has not stopped since. Having grown in the Toronto scene and toured all around North America, Jeff recently moved back to London and for the past couple of months has been hosting his self-titled web series “The Jeff Leeson Show.” I had a chat with him on a Monday afternoon and picked his brain for a personal view on the struggles, the passions and the life of working in the comedy game…





How did it all begin?



“I started when I was 14 years old and by the time I graduated high-school I had been doing it pretty much full time. But during that time, at least once a week or two my mom would pick me up after school and we would drive usually to Hamilton, Niagra Falls, or Toronto because London didn’t really have a big comedy scene back then.



The summer that I graduated (high-school) I booked myself on a tour. It was just me, I was doing 45-60 minutes of comedy at a time and making about a hundred bucks a show just on a Western Ontario tour and just never looked back from there. So it’s been a near 16 year ride from that point.

It was weird, well it was a different life, you know? I had nobody that really understood it because none of my friends were in comedy, they were all just students still figuring out what they wanted to do in life; they didn’t really have a dream like that or if they did it was very different. It was kind of a weird time in high-school because others never really understood that my goal was just to work and be paid to do stand-up.

What was your biggest challenge as a young comic starting off?

There were a few. The biggest challenge for me was that I was so young that a lot of people didn’t want to have me on shows or I just wasn’t allowed in the venue. I was doing gigs at fifteen/sixteen years old, but the one thing that did help is that I always kinda looked older, but if there was ever a situation where I showed up and got carded, it was illegal for me to be in there. My mom, thank god, was so supportive that she’d be with me and was the guardian and said ‘ya, he’s allowed in here.’ That was a big one for me, my age.

The other thing was just stage time and where to get it, there wasn’t in London what there is now. Yuk Yuks did amateur night once every four months at that point. There was a frequent Wednesday night in Hamilton, but there was so many people from the GTA, Hamilton and others, that you could do that maybe once every few months. It was very difficult, so I ended up having to do a Scot’s Corner music open-mic. I would go down there and they would give me some time, and there used to be a place called Carry’s over by Fanshaw college and they had music open mics. I was doing a lot of those, which are terrible to do as a comedian because people are not in the mind-set of comedy. As you know, comedy is a very intricate time whereas with music you can just sorta chat with your friends and eat your wings, so if someone is playing a guitar behind you, you don’t have to give a shit about what’s going on – but with comedy they have to actually watch, listen, pay attention and be engaged in what is happening.

That was a big struggle for me too, just where to do comedy. I did a lot of music open mics, a lot of couch shows at school, I did some stuff where I’d just do my own shows. Me and some buddies who had a band, every year would throw a thing called ‘Music and Laughs,’ they’d start off playing some music and I just closed the show off with a bit of comedy – at the end of it we’d just give the money to the Canadian Institute for the Blind, where my mom works.

So the biggest challenge I think was where to actually hone your skills and do comedy and get on stage and just get that five to seven minutes, but I was willing to do it anywhere. If I had to set up just in a backyard and get some comedy in for my mom’s work functions, just to get the feel of it, you know?

What was the reception like?

“It was mostly, ‘What the f**k is this? What the hell is going on? What instrument are you going to play? Why are you talking to us?'” *laughs*



And what were you talking to them about?

“When I was really young, fourteen/fifteen, I had a lot of material, but it was material I had heard on T.V. I didn’t understand the rules of comedy yet, you know? Stealing material or whatever, I just thought ‘I’m gonna try this guy’s joke, I liked it so I’ll try it.’ Then little by little, as I grew and understood comedy and how it works, I thought ‘Oh shit, I’m just happy with my own stuff here.’ By the time I was doing these open mics, my material was very personal. Again, I couldn’t relate to people cause here I am talking about homework and my mom or grandparents, and the people I was talking to are as old as my mom and grandparents, all goin’, ‘we don’t give a shit… nobody cares.’

So it wasn’t very well received and I bombed for probably about three/four years – it was very rare to have a show where I didn’t bomb. Now, that being said, I loved being on stage, I loved the rush and I loved the feeling, but it certainly wasn’t well received by the crowd.”

When did it start to turn around for you?

“It definitely didn’t click back then, what happened was, as the years went by, I took it on the chin so many times on stage and ate shit so often that that stopped bothering me. I really got a sense of no fear and when you don’t have fear on stage, you’re a lot more relaxed, and when you’re comfortable that’s when your real and true self comes out. That started to make me go, ‘you know what? If boming is the worst thing that’s gonna happen to me, or be heckled up here, then I can handle that.’ I didn’t have a problem with that at all since it’d experienced that for the last few years.

It wasn’t until I started really touring and I would go into the states a lot, I would do all these small town America shows, and they didn’t give a f**k about material at all – so I started doing crowd work. Once I started improvising and doing these bits of crowd work and making it personal, that’s really when it clicked for me. For whatever reason, I could just make it a personal show. When I started talking about them and their city, or the guy in the first row with a weird shirt, or whatever it might be, that was the point when it really started to click for me that maybe that was where I was at my best.”

How do you view the scene in London today comparatively?

“Right now seems like the best I’ve seen it in that I’ve never seen as many shows here in London, you know? For me starting, I always had to leave to do it. This is the most in years I’ve seen here, this is the biggest scene I’ve seen, the most shows, the most options. I don’t get the chance to go to a lot of open mics here just because I’m busy with a lot of stuff and on the weekends I’m always on the road doing shows, so I don’t get a chance to really be involved so much in the scene. But I have friends that are involved and I talk to them quite frequently and I see lots of posts on Facebook and that for shows, I hope that it continues.

London is an interesting town when it comes to entertainment. There’s a lot of people here, students in both a college and university, and other people with different interests, so there is definitely a need for it and I’m glad that it’s happening – it’s certainly at the best that I’ve seen it. I have seen the shows and the amount of people coming out now in the audience and doing comedy, and it’s certainly the most people I’ve seen that are doing their own shows as well. Just the way of starting a room and doing it on a ‘place to start basis’, which is very similar to Toronto. I mean in Toronto you can do sometimes three/four sets in a night if you time it out well enough and while that’s not necessarily happening here yet, you might be able to do three/four sets in a week, where when I was doing the amateur/open-mic scene that just wasn’t possible to do here.

Like I was saying earlier, you might be lucky to get on Yuk Yuks open mic three times a year back then. So it was also easy to get on cause there wasn’t many around it was like me and a guy named Vito D’Amico, and we were like the only two guys really around at that point trying to do comedy on a consistent basis. It was very very tough back then, but now there’s a situation where people took it into their own hands, right? They didn’t wait for Yuk Yuks, they didn’t wait for another club to open up, they just said ‘f**k it, let’s go the bars and lets say we’ll do some comedy.’ Comedy is different, it’s an all together different atmosphere, it’s a different vibe, different show. It’s not karaoke or a DJ, it’s so much different, but people love to laugh so why not? Why wouldn’t there be a great scene for us? And I really do hope it continues.”

Tell me about the Jeff Leeson Show

“In early January I had a meeting with 1290CJBK, which is a talk radio station through Bell Media. We worked out a deal for me to do a talk radio show, podcast hour once a week. So I had everything ready to go and all of a sudden I got an email saying ‘oh you know what? There’s actually been some issues here and the GM put the kibosh on it and we gotta kinda take a minute here to put it on the back burner.’ That kinda bummed me out because it was one of those things I thought I could sink my teeth into and pitch it down the line. But I was talking to my buddy Dave and we said, ‘you know what, if we can’t do it through Bell Media, maybe we won’t have a studio or whatever, but why couldn’t we just do it ourselves and post it on the internet and see what happens?’ So little by little we researched podcasts and researched all the equipment we’ll need, which we don’t have a budget for. So I thought, we do have a video camera, so why don’t we just flip that on and we’ll get my buddy Lars Classington to come down for a day. We’ll flip the camera on, shoot for thirty minutes, forty five minutes, and we’ll see what we got. So he came down, we turned on the camera and we shot the show that was kind of like a podcast time deal. At the end of it I thought, ‘this is brutal; I don’t know what the hell we were thinkin’ here, but this is absolutely awful.’

Well the next day I come home and Dan Shaba had taken what we shot and he’d edited together just a terrific looking five minute, almost like clip show. We looked at each other and we’re like ‘now this, this is something we could do.’ And it would make sense for this day and age, the internet generation where people don’t wanna sit down and watch a thirty minute show or podcast or whatever it may be, they just want something quick and snappy. So we thought, maybe we’re onto something here. I really liked what he did so we shot another the following week, shot for over an hour, but put it together and people seemed to really enjoy it. We get a lot of messages from people just sayin ‘hey we really like what you’re doing, we’re behind the show, please keep making them.’ It just sort of took off from there. After we filmed a couple more I was approached by a production company in London that came and said ‘we think you guys are sitting on something that could potentially blow up and I see great marketing potential, and I’ve got the professional camera and lighting and all that so I think I can make it look just terrific!’ So the last couple of episodes we got them on board and went around the community doing on-location stuff, which let’s me do my improvised stuff with people.

As of right now, the response has been great. We’ve hit just about thirty thousand views in only a month, we’ve got the production company now, we just made a pitch to CBC to have our show with them and we just got our first sponsor who came on board last week. It really just started as a ‘hey let’s see what happens’ and now it’s spread out into what I do full time. Everyday we wanna move towards something and in these few weeks, it’s come a long long way.

Right now the show is online, but eventually I’d like to make a pitch and sell it to a network or Netflix, CraveTV, Showme, and get some national exposure from it.”

What’s your best piece of advice to someone who really wants to jump into the comedy world?

“There is no simple answer, but what I would say is this: If you’re a stand-up comedian and this is what you want to do with your life, one who really wants to make it in comedy, what you really need is a clear-cut vision of what is it exactly that you want from this. Is it ‘I want to tour and make money just solely off comedy?’ Is it, ‘I wanna be a writer for a show or movies?’ Are you more of a writer than a performer? Are you prop-based, sketch-based, stand-up? What is it exactly that you want to go for?

Then know that there’s like no education for this, you can’t go to school. Well, you can go to Humber College and they can teach you how to craft jokes or write sketches, they can teach you the writing aspect of it, but there’s nobody that can teach you the performance aspect of it – other than yourself getting up and doing it. And that’s the only and best advice I can give is that if this is really what you want to do and it’s you’re true passion or calling in life, you have to get out there and do it as much as possible. Don’t expect money, in the beginning. Don’t expect money for years, but that’s the decision. If you’re really passionate about something you would do it whether there was money or not. If you’re good at something the money will come, eventually.

What I can’t stand is people who have been in comedy for like six months and go ‘I’m not going to do that gig because it doesn’t pay me.’ Six months into comedy is still a baby, you know what I mean? It doesn’t matter that someone’s killed, cause they’re going to bomb at some point. Some people will kill at first and think ‘I’m God’s gift to comedy.’ Well you’re not because eventually you’re going to face a crowd that doesn’t like you and you’re not going to understand why because you haven’t done it long enough.



So I would say if you’re actually passionate about comedy, be willing to do it for free. Be willing to do it anywhere and everywhere that will give you a mic and respect it. Have respect. Have respect for people that have put the time/effort/energy into being paid and don’t expect to be one of those people until you are truly and thoroughly ready. Make sure that you just find a stage anywhere somebody will give you a mic. Don’t just do comedy clubs cause you’ll never know if you’re actually good at comedy or not. You might be doing well at a club, but eventually you’ll have to do a corporate show, eventually you’ll have to do a college or some shitty little bar in a shitty little town, if you want this life. So I would give this advice: do it as much, in as many different places, for as many different types of people as you possibly can.”

Make sure to check out the Jeff Leeson Show here and on YouTube. And be sure to check out his Facebook page to keep up with any live shows he’ll be doing in the area. He is definitely a local you don’t wanna miss!