Steph Tolev

Steph Tolev stalks the stage in a jumpsuit and a shaggy mullet, delivering punchlines in a guttural, gravelly yell. She refuses to stand still, contorting her face and throwing her limbs into bizarre postures. When she describes a terrible date or a strange bodily function, she does not tell the story from a safe distance. She reenacts the embarrassing details with sweaty, loud enthusiasm, dropping her voice into a raspy growl to close out a bit. She will happily make herself the ugliest person in the room to land a joke.

She is the kind of act other comedians watch from the back of the room. Bill Burr took her on tour and put her on his showcase special long before she broke wider. After years of grinding as a staple at the Comedy Store, she has graduated to theater headliner and streaming specials. A massive online audience now tunes in just to watch her yell at latecomers in the front row.

The core of her act is a total refusal of dignity. She leans into the gross-out mechanics of dating and physical aging with sweat and volume. The delivery is so loud that it is easy to miss the timing underneath. What looks like an improvised meltdown is actually a tight physical performance. If a premise runs thin, she just powers through it on sheer force of will, winning the crowd back with a contorted expression or a sudden animal noise.

She grew up in Toronto doing competitive highland dance, a bizarre piece of trivia that entirely explains the leg strength required to squat and thrash her way through an hour of comedy.