Jeremy Hotz is having a bad day. There’s a rat in his kitchen and it’s decided to take up residence. It started with a crash the other day. Hotz came downstairs to find his newly-bought hot dog buns knocked off the counter and on the floor.
“The whole bag, for fuck’s sakes!” he laughs, speaking by phone from West Hollywood with The Coast. “So now I have to throw those out, right?”
To make matters worse, the exterminator he called won’t help him. Not enough rats to make the job worthwhile, apparently.
“Like, he’s gonna wait until the thing has babies,” Hotz says.
It seems a cruel time to tell him about Halifax’s famously rat-infested reputation. Hotz—one of Canada’s most successful and longest-touring stand-up comics, known for finding the downside in everything from new pants to pigeons—will be performing at the Bruce Guthro Theatre on Jan 31.
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Or at least, that’s the plan.
“They didn’t seem to build any houses out of bricks [in Halifax],” Hotz jokes. “They just have wood. So if nobody, you know, drops a cigarette, then I guess I’ll be there on the date.”
From Ottawa to The Late Show with David Letterman
Though he’s lived in Los Angeles for years, the 61-year-old Hotz is still a Canadian at heart. Born and raised in Ottawa, he fell in love with comedy as a teen after watching George Carlin at the National Arts Centre. Carlin’s brashness, his cynical wit, was unlike anything Hotz had seen before, given the limited—and often buttoned-up—options that had defined the era.
“The comics that I saw on TV were like Ed Sullivan and Henny Youngman,” he tells The Coast. “I wasn’t interested in it. But when I saw what Carlin was doing, then it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I understand that. I get that now.’ He was the first guy that I saw who was like that.”
Still, it took Hotz until his mid-twenties to try stand-up comedy for himself. He did a year of university. (“Didn’t last,” he says.) Applied to jobs.
“No one would hire me, so I had to do something myself,” he says. “I think people didn’t like the look on my face.”
His first show was an amateur night at Yuk Yuk’s in Ottawa. The manager liked him. So began a career that would see him become a Just For Laughs Comedy Festival favourite, along with a writer on The Jon Stewart Show, a Gemini Award-winning actor and an internationally touring comic with invitations to The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
This winter will mark Hotz’s 10th cross-Canada tour. Très Misérables kicks off Jan 17 in Victoria, BC, and wraps mid-March in Winnipeg after 17 stops across the country. (Halifax is one of two Maritime shows for Hotz, who will also perform in Moncton on Feb 1.)
The rarity of making a career as a comic isn’t lost on him.
“I’m really lucky,” Hotz tells The Coast.
A moment of sincerity. Has he softened with his years? Become less miserable?
Never that, Hotz says.
“I think that I physically suit my act now better than I did when I was younger,” he adds. “Because now I’m the miserable old man, which is perfect. I’m the ‘get off my lawn’ guy, and I live in a condo. I don’t even have a fucking lawn!”
Jeremy Hotz plays Halifax Friday, January 31, at Casino Nova Scotia’s Bruce Guthro Theatre. Tickets are available here.
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.