Che Durena

Port Coquitlam, by way of Playa del Carmen

Durena grew up in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, and came to stand-up after watching an older brother perform in the same town. The first move was outward rather than into the Canadian circuit: in 2011 he went to Mexico, working days as a scuba diving instructor and nights performing for tourists. The accounts he has given of that period differ slightly in their detail — in one telling the first set came in Playa del Carmen in late 2012, with a bartending job paying for it — but the shape of it holds. He learned the job several thousand kilometres from any established comedy scene, in front of rooms of holidaymakers who had not booked a comedy night.

That start matters to how he talks about himself now. The line he repeats in interviews is that he is a stand-up first, and that the platform came afterwards; the biography he keeps correcting is the one where a viral comic appears from nowhere.

Twenty-five dollars and a Toronto shelter

In 2014 he moved to Toronto to do comedy full time. By his own account he bought the plane ticket and arrived with twenty-five dollars, then lived in a shelter while he worked the rooms. The reasoning, as he has since described it, was blunt: "They're not gonna let you die in Canada." The Corner Comedy Club became the main proving ground.

The material he was building there was already the material he does now — sex, bodily functions, the mechanics of being a man in his twenties — and he is unembarrassed about the register. He has argued that the base of a great deal of comedy is exactly that, citing Trey Parker and Matt Stone as the proof, and that the skill lies in the construction rather than the subject. What sounds improvised, he says, has usually been refined over years.

The pandemic, and the strategy that was not the obvious one

When live comedy shut in 2020, the standard survival move was to cut up old club footage and crowd work and post it. Durena could not: he had not been filming his sets and had no archive to mine. Instead he built videos around the two things he could produce on demand — joke writing and riffing — commentating over other people's clips rather than replaying his own.

It worked at a scale that outran the club career. By March 2024 the TikTok account had 7.7 million followers, almost all of it accumulated since the start of the pandemic. Venue and promoter listings in 2026 put the combined following above eight million and the cumulative view count past a billion. He turned 31 in the spring of 2024, and had by then relocated again — to New York in 2022, on the reasoning that the city's audiences were the hardest available — before going out on a North American headline run billed as the Raw Dog Tour.

The Canadian leg of that tour ended at home. Just For Laughs Vancouver presented him at the Vogue Theatre on 24 February 2024, a booking with a detail he enjoyed pointing out beforehand: the first show he would ever see at the Vogue was his own.

The records

The recorded work is thinner than the audience figures suggest, which is a function of how recently the audience arrived. The debut album, Tales from My Butthole, was self-released on 9 September 2020 — seventeen tracks, about forty-five minutes, cut from club sets rather than a filmed theatre show.

Before comedy paid, he hosted and wrote for the YouTube countdown series My Most Amazing Top 10 and made content for Herb, both of which taught him the rhythms of short video years before he needed them. Television credits accumulated around the festival appearances: JFL All Access, the Comedy Network, CraveTV, and features on CBC.

The first full special arrived on 26 April 2026, when How To Make Your Balls Bigger premiered on the LOL! Stand-Up YouTube channel. It is built on the two things the live show is built on — storytelling at length and off-the-cuff riffing — and it went out free on a platform rather than to a streamer, which is consistent with how he has talked about distribution. The one reservation he has expressed about working online is community guideline enforcement; the compensation is that nobody commissions him.

Three festivals and a stadium support slot

He has played Just For Laughs three times, headlining sold-out theatre shows there, including a Toronto run at the Randolph Theatre promoted by Comedy Bar. He has shared bills with Jay Pharoah, Fortune Feimster, Brad Williams and Lil Rel Howery.

The largest rooms he has worked came as a support act: he opened for Bert Kreischer on the Tops Off Stadium Tour, playing to crowds well past 12,000. He is also a regular on the podcast circuit that now functions as comedy's distribution network — The Bertcast, Are You Garbage, KFC Radio among them.

The argument he keeps making

Durena is unusual among comics with his numbers in how much of his interview time goes on craft rather than controversy. Asked about self-censorship and the state of the form, he has rejected both halves of the usual fight: the comic who says something agreeable and waits for applause and the comic who says something deliberately offensive and blames the room for not laughing are, in his framing, doing the same thing — trading on a position instead of a written joke.

His stated influences are Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Bill Burr and Jim Jefferies, and, from outside comedy entirely, the video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, whose refusal to soften his work he treats as a model. The organising idea underneath the dirty material is absurdity, and specifically the absurdity of sex: universal, constant, commercially exploited everywhere, and still treated as shameful. He considers that gap the joke.

Where he is now

The current phase is international expansion. On 31 August 2026 a five-date debut run across Australia and New Zealand was announced, presented by BOHM Presents: The Tivoli in Brisbane on 9 October, The Tuning Fork in Auckland on 10 October, the National Theatre in St Kilda, Melbourne, on 13 October, the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on 14 October and The Rechabite in Perth on 15 October. Tickets went on sale at 11am local time in each market. The venues are theatre-scale rather than club-scale, which is the bet the promoter is making on a following built almost entirely through a phone screen.

North American dates continue to be announced piecemeal rather than as a single named tour; at the time of writing, some clubs that have hosted him, including Comedy Works in Denver, list nothing on the books. He is based in Toronto, and by the arithmetic of his own career is roughly fifteen years into a job he has said usually takes twenty before anyone notices.