Charles Demers is a comedian & humourist, author, voice actor, playwright, screenwriter, & speechwriter based in Vancouver. One of Canada’s top stand-up comics — who has opened for Sarah Silverman, Marc Maron, Bob Odenkirk, and others — he is also a regular performer on Sirius satellite and CBC radio, including 20 years on the comedy smash-hit The Debaters. He is one of the stars of two Emmy-winning Netflix animated series, Beat Bugs (based on the immortal music of The Beatles), and provides the voice of ‘Poutine’ on Will Arnett’s patriotic superhero send-up Super Team Canada, for which he has also written two episodes. Demers’s iTunes Canada #1-selling stand-up album Fatherland, from 604 Records, was nominated for the 2018 Juno Award for Best Comedy Album.
He is the author of the bestselling essay collections Vancouver Special (a finalist for the Hubert Evans BC Book prize for Non-fiction), The Horrors, and The Eh Team; the novels The Prescription Errors, Primary Obsessions, and Noonday Dark; and the forthcoming children’s picture book I Sure Do. He is the co-author, with Canada’s first Poet Laureate George Bowering, of The Dad Dialogues, a collection of epistolary non-fiction on fatherhood.
His bestselling comedic crime novel, Property Values, has been optioned for development as a feature film by Pioneer Pictures of Los Angeles, with a screenplay cowritten by Demers. Charles has written scripts for stage, radio, & screen; has taught creative writing at the university level; & edited-curated Robin’s Egg Books, a humour imprint from Arsenal Pulp Press.
He has written for Jacobin, Vancouver Magazine, and Outdoor Canada, and appeared as a featured guest on the popular WTF podcast with Marc Maron. He is a speechwriter (and joke-writer) for British Columbia Premier David Eby.