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“People make their night about the show, they get babysitters, they drive in from out of town,” Hofstetter said. “I just kept thinking of how disappointed they would be if I wasn’t there.”

Norton and Hofstetter scrambled to come up with a solution. Hofstetter called the venue and asked if he could do his set via Skype, but staff said it was not possible.

Norton had another idea.

“I had a silly set one time where I recorded a bunch of one-liners on my iPad and plugged (the iPad) into the sound system,” said Norton, who is originally from Wichita, but now resides in Toronto.

“I figured if I could do that with my iPad, I could do it with my phone.”

Norton set up the venue and explained the situation to fans as they arrived. They were offered refunds but none took them. Norton said it was a packed room, with more than 100 people who stayed for the show.

“I did about an hour of material and it was a fantastic show, everybody was really supportive,” Norton said.

“At the end I surprised everyone by calling Steve over the phone.”

Norton called Hofstetter for a Q&A period, which Hofstetter usually does during his shows to help him connect with his audience.

Fans listened intently to Hofstetter’s voice coming from Norton’s phone.

“Often the concert ticket interaction is not a human experience — you’re going to see live art but you don’t get to know that artist as a person,” Hofstetter said.

“I think people really appreciated that we pulled back the curtains (so they could) see that everyone’s human. I wanted everybody to have a good time.”

One of the questions Hofstetter was asked was if he was happy he didn’t have to go through what happened on a recent United Airlines flight, when a passenger was physically removed from his seat due to overbooking.

“(I said) that guy got a couple million bucks, I’m out 300,” Hofstetter said.

Hofstetter took to Twitter to vent after Air Canada’s handling of the flight cancellation.