Three comedians are on the second leg of their first post-COVID Canadian tour with the DIY Comedy Tour.

Scott Porteous, Frank Russo and Mike Payne are three comedians who started their tour in western Canada. The next half of the tour starting in September will have them going through Ontario.

While this is their first tour post pandemic, they have been on the road before. Russo and Porteous have known each other for a while and have toured with each other before, while Payne has done North America and Scotland tours.

Payne and Porteous met during the pandemic in a comedy workshop online which Scott created. The workshop was created as a way for comedians to hone their skills every week while shows were foreseeably cancelled. In this workshop the idea of the DIY tour began.

“It was cloud talk for a while. I talked about it with Mike. We want to do something and just sort of like putting things into practice. It was just a year before the pandemic ended, something like that” says Porteous.

“[Porteous]  was mentioning that he was gonna go [on tour] with Frank again at the time. But [Porteous] said he would include me in a future tour, which was really nice. I never expected anything to come of it. Then [Porteous] came back to me like a few months later, and we started planning it,” says Payne.

In the first half of the tour, the trio did 17 shows within 20 days starting in Manitoba and going between British Columbia and Alberta at the end.

While on tour, they had their fair share of negative experiences, from bad hotels, to poor sleep and cancelled shows. They had one show that was cancelled the week of which lost the money on the show but also the advertising.

“It's so frustrating because you can't prepare for that. You can put all the advertising you can , you can do word of mouth, social media, etc, etc. That was a little stressful. We had one show and they didn't want to take that chance,” says Porteous.

Each of the comedians have a different reason and starting point in their comedy careers. Porteous grew up watching Just For Laughs; wanting to give it a try and has now been in the scene for 20 years with a performance of his character Herbert Henries on Canada’s Got Talent.

Much like Porteous, Russo was a fan of comedy. A friend “hassled” Russo until he relented and gave it a try. The friend helped book a lot of shows within a week in Toronto. Russo then drove three and a half hours to Toronto almost everyday “to his own funeral.”

Payne on the other hand had a more somber reason for starting: a friend of Payne died of cancer and “wrote five minutes in the next few months.”

“[I performed] at Yuk Yuk’s for the first time because I figured if I was going to do it once I better do it on the big stage. Right? It was like one of those [defecate] or get off the pot moments. That got me into [comedy] and I was hooked right away,” says Payne.

The DIY Comedy Tour comes to Toronto on Sept. 16.

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