Being hard of hearing is a source of a lot of material for stand-up comedian D.J. Demers. Without his hearing aids, he’s considered deaf. When he takes them out to sleep at sketchy hotels, he says, “I’m very easy to murder.”

And since hearing aids aren’t waterproof, “pool parties are a nightmare,” he jokes. “I’m not very good at Marco Polo.”

As a new dad, people warned him to be ready for a lot of sleepless nights. “It’s been pretty chill. I’d love to help more, but this damn disability, you know?”

Nothing to joke about at first

Demers was diagnosed with hearing loss when he was 4 years old. As a kid, he saw nothing funny about it.

“I never joked about my hearing aids when I was young. I actually kind of hid them,” he says. “If I had to change them at recess or something, I would kind of run away from everybody and do it in a private corner.”

Then Demers learned that making people laugh was a way to make friends and deflect potential ridicule.

“If they had any feelings that they didn’t want to be friends with me because I had a disability, I could overcome that because I was funny,” he says.

He’s so funny, the Canadian-born Demers won the “Homegrown Comics” competition at the prestigious Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal in 2014. That led to spots on Conan, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and America’s Got Talent. He developed and starred in a sitcom for CBC Television and filmed four specials. His latest, Azoospermia, is about his and his wife’s journey conceiving a child.

Sign language interpreters in his stand-up

After about five years doing stand-up for hearing audiences, Demers realized having a sign language interpreter on stage would help him reach others in the deaf community. The first interpreter he hired was Jennifer Lees.

“I’ve seen concerts with interpreters for music and I’ve seen lots of spoken word stuff,” says Lees. “But comedy, definitely, there was a gap there for deaf and hard of hearing consumers who just want to be able to go out to Yuk Yuks or one of the [other] comedy chains and have some fun.”

Lees, who’s interpreted for Demers many times, says deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences can relate to his material, like his jokes about not being able to lip read during the pandemic.

“Nobody’s ever talked about [hearing loss] in a funny way,” says Lees. “You know, people very rarely talk about it at all, never mind with an incredible insight into how awkward and strange communication can be.”

Not just ‘the hearing aid guy’

From the beginning of his stand-up career, Demers says, he was reluctant to make too much of his act about his disability. “But there’s so much stuff to talk about and a lot of funny stuff and it is a unique perspective.”

And that perspective has changed over time.

“I have a kid now and now he’s got a hard of hearing father. So I’m watching how he perceives me when I can’t hear him well. And so that’s shifting my own perspective on my disability,” he says.

“If I really leaned into being, you know, the hearing aid guy, I could really, like capture that market,” Demers reasoned, “But at what cost? I have to explore more beyond it just to be artistically fulfilled.”

Ramy Arida/D.J. Demers

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Still, Demers doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as “the hearing aid guy.” In fact, much of his material has nothing to do with disability at all. He’s joked about social media, his passion for speed walking and being tested for infertility.

Yet with the explosion of stand-up in recent years, some comedians feel pressure to find their niche and stick to it.

“If I really leaned into being ‘the hearing aid guy,’ I could capture that market,” Demers says. “But at what cost? I have to explore more beyond it, just to be artistically fulfilled.”

Demers will make his second appearance on The Tonight Show this week (scheduled for Nov. 26) and then he will go on to tour the United States.

Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for broadcast and digital. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.

Visitors can hear Björk’s immersive, otherworldly soundscape, Nature Manifesto, over the next few weeks as they climb the long, glass escalator that hugs the side of Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.

Björk is not only an Icelandic pop star, but also an avant-garde artist and climate activist. Her new sound installation blends the noises of endangered and extinct animals with her own voice, reading text she co-wrote alongside editor and photographer Aleph Molinari.

“It is an emergency. The apocalypse has already happened. And how we will act now is essential,” Björk recites over an array of ear-tingling wildlife noises that are sometimes natural, sometimes otherworldly. “In a pioneering sound strata of mutant peacocks, bees, and lemurs, biology will reassemble in new ways.”

A journey through different sonic worlds

Created with IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a preeminent music and sound research institute based in Paris, the installation employs field recordings of animal sounds. Some of these were manipulated using artificial intelligence.

“As you go up the escalator, you go through all these different sonic worlds,” said IRCAM sound artist Robin Meier Wiratunga, who collaborated with Björk on the installation. “We have orangutans, mosquitoes, beluga whales, and then when you reach the top floor, the climactic musical event, which we lovingly call the ‘Dolphin Disco.’” 

Some creatures whose vocalizations appear in Nature Manifesto, such as the Hawaiian crow, cannot be heard in the wild anymore. The creative team grabbed this bird’s call from an archive of extinct animals.

“This immersive sound piece gives endangered and extinct animals a voice by merging their sounds with our words, handing them the microphone,” Björk said in a statement shared with NPR. “We wanted to share their presence in an architecture representing the industrial age, far away from nature. We wanted to remind citizens of the raw vitality of endangered creatures.”

Capturing the sounds of lost species

We don’t know for sure what sounds many extinct animals made. University of Texas paleontologist Julia Clarke, who studies the sounds of extinct animals, said we can glean clues by studying sound-making in living species and the preserved soft tissues, skeletons and fossils of extinct ones.

“We might look at the sound-producing structures, like vibratory vocal cords,” Clarke said. “We might look at the structures that are rubbed together or banged together.”

Up to one million plant and animal species are facing extinction due to human activity including climate change, pollution and habitat loss, according to a 2019 global report on biodiversity.

“What we’ve noticed in mass extinction is really the absence of sound,” Clarke said.

But she added that Nature Manifesto isn’t only highlighting this catastrophic loss. It also suggests if we stop destroying the planet, that species might continue to evolve.

“It’s challenging us to think about in visceral ways what a very different and very acoustically diverse future might sound like,” she said. “I hope it is that acoustically diverse.”

Björk and Aleph Molinari collaborated on Nature Manifesto at Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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Björk the climate activist

Björk’s passion for environmental stewardship runs deep. Some of her albums touch upon the natural world and its complex relationship to technology, such as Biophilia (2011) and Fossora (2022). She also advocates strongly for ecological causes, including her ongoing fight against intensive fish farming in her native Iceland. A recently discovered butterfly species — Pterourus bjorkae — was recently named in her honor.

The singer, visual artist and activist Anohni, who is exhibiting a companion video piece alongside Nature Manifesto at Centre Pompidou, said she and Björk often talk about climate issues.

“We’ve spoken a lot about environment over the years, just as artists between each other, trying to understand our right-size relationship to this unfolding crisis and the different ways that we might utilize our agency as artists,” she said. “She’s always been such a profound and moving optimist.”

Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.