Jon Lajoie is an Internet sensation who’s taken it to the next level. In two short years, the 29-year-old Montreal native has gone from posting humorous R-rated songs on YouTube to costarring on an FX TV series (The League) and selling out theatres on a cross-country comedy tour.

Granted, he wasn’t just some bub off the street. Lajoie, the third oldest of nine children, did three years of theatre school and all the requisite Shakespeare that entailed; played the “English dude” on an “hourlong kind of dramatic, somewhat light-hearted soap opera–ish kinda thing” on Quebec TV (L’auberge du chien noir); and played guitar and sang in a band (psychedelic folk-rockers Fluid Rouge) for four years. Still, his sudden rocket to fame came as a surprise even to him.

“I really had no expectations at all of it getting where it is. It’s really insane,” he said on the phone from a tour stop in Iowa. “As an example, when one of my first videos reached a thousand views I was blown away. I couldn’t believe a thousand people had watched one of my videos.”¦Never in a million years would I think that a few years later I’d have, like, 130 million views on YouTube alone. Even 10,000 views a couple years ago was so out of reach and insane for me to even think of that now it’s like it’s just snowballed out of control.”

The strength in his parodies is in his commitment to the music coupled with ridiculously mundane subject matter. “I always wanted musically for it to sound like a real song, and the way I perform it to kind of look like a real song,” he says. “I think it kind of punches the joke a little bit when it’s delivered seriously.”

But listen carefully. The chorus to his craptastic, James Blunt–like take on “Radio Friendly Song”, which is anything but, starts out like this: “They want another stupid mother-fucking/lame cock-sucking/cookie-cutter radio-friendly song.”

Speaking of crap, only Lajoie could take the most vile and vomit-inducing viral video and make a love song out of it. His “2 Girls 1 Cup Song” is an ode to the scatologically perverse Brazilian trailer for the porn film Hungry Bitches. In it, Lajoie earnestly sings, “Some people say I love you/Some even shout it out/Some people puke semi-digested shit into each others mouths.”

“I thought it was so funny and absurd that something of that nature is what becomes popular on the Internet,” he explains. “As a social tool, the Internet is an infinite well of information and of knowledge and all this great stuff, and the one thing that everyone knows is two girls shitting on each other.”¦I’d never really seen someone love someone that intensely before. That’s a different kind of love. So I decided to write a song about that different kind of love that seems so beautiful and intense.”

Why sully his melodies with such base lyrics? Having grown up watching Kids in the Hall, Lajoie says he’s drawn toward the strange. “I tend to gravitate towards extremes, I guess,” he says. “Either violence or extreme sexual references superimposed onto something that’s really beautiful, I find kinda funny.”

Lajoie’s live show, which hits the Vogue Theatre on Wednesday (December 16), is a combination of music, videos, and standup comedy. Although his newfound fame has brought its pressures, there is an upside, he says: “I feel like it’s easier to perform anything in front of a thousand people who are fans than to stand in a comedy club in front of 30 people that don’t know you.”