Fans of the CBC sitcom Mr. D know the story: standup comic Gerry Dee created the show based on his 10 years in the trenches teaching high school. In it, he plays an in-over-his-head slacker blowhard charged with imparting knowledge to impressionable teenagers. They don’t exactly learn much in his class.

But what was the real Mr. Donahue like? (Dee is his stage surname.) While he employed humour in the classroom, a businesslike Dee tells the Straight from his home in Toronto that he kept a tight rein on his students.

“What’s similar is that I didn’t know history or geography, which I taught,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was really doing. What’s not similar is I wasn’t the goofball you see on TV; I was actually pretty strict and commanded a disciplined classroom and managed the kids. A lot of people that knew me as a teacher would say, ‘He joked around but he was also very serious sometimes.’ ”

He adopted the stage name because he didn’t want anyone to connect the dots to his day job. And it stuck. It’s worked out pretty well for him, too. He was headlining clubs just eight months into comedy and had a TV special after 18 months—a testament to his hard work more than anything. Although being funny helps a lot, too.

“I was very driven to be successful as far back as I can remember. And always thought I would be,” the son of a bus driver and dental assistant says. “I believe in anything you do, if you set your mind to it, there’s a good chance you can go very far; you just don’t know how far it’s going to take you.”

His role models were the likes of Russell Peters and Dane Cook—not for their comedy but what they did with it.

“You think, ‘Why don’t I try to get that? Why don’t I try to get as big as I can?’ ” he says. “I always wanted to be the top of everything. I never really have been, but I’ve always tried to get there. I think that’s part of becoming successful: just trying to get there.”

So in 2003, when some pitch-driven American comics kept telling him his standup set was a perfect sitcom, that set the wheels in motion. He started jotting down ideas. Three years later, he started thinking about it again. The following year he began pitching the series. It wasn’t until 2010 that the pilot was shot.

The result is a show that is as good as any ever produced in this country—and better than many on major American networks.

“You try to make a show that you’d like watching and you’d think was funny,” Dee says.

While some of the actors in the ensemble cast play it overly broad, most, including the star, are pitch-perfect.

“I like small humour. I don’t like big humour,” he says. “I like awkward humour. But my favourite humour is where you’re saying things that people wish they could say but no one does. That’s the humour I grew up on. That’s very Scottish and it’s very much what I like. That’s not our whole show but that’s certainly what kind of humour I like. Very subtle.”

Gerry Dee’s all-ages tour plays the Vogue Theatre on Thursday (January 29) with Graham Chittenden opening.