WSU will welcome comedian D.J. Demers today as he opens his “Here to Hear” comedy tour in the CUB Auditorium.

Demers is touring 20 different universities in October as a part of Disabilities Employment Awareness Month, starting at WSU and ending at Yale University.

Demers partnered with Phonak, a hearing aid development company, to create this tour to help raise awareness of hearing loss among college students, he said.

“The whole point of the tour is to destigmatize hearing loss,” Demers said.

Demers started wearing hearing aids at the age of 4. He said he had tubes put in his ears to try to correct the issue, but they would fall out, and each time they were replaced, they worked less and less.

So Demers was given hearing aids. He said that just the other day he was talking to his mom, and she told him that she didn’t know how bad his hearing was until he got the hearing aids and came out of the bathroom, saying “the water makes a noise when it flushes.”

Demers, 31, has been doing stand-up comedy for nine years.

“I just dove into it,” he said. “I found an open mic, bombed for a few years, then learned how to be funny. In three words: I love comedy.”

He said he can’t imagine doing anything else with his life, and suggests to anyone interested in stand-up comedy to just go for it.

“There’s the potential that every time you get up there, you could bomb,” he said. “But if you’ve been thinking about it, just do it.”

Demers was on season 11 of “America’s Got Talent,” where he made it to the judges’ cuts.

“It was cool to be in front of the judges,” he said, “like Heidi Klum, Simon Cowell, Mel B, my favorite Spice Girl.”

Being on AGT helped him open up to being an advocate for hearing loss, he said. After the show aired, many people reached out to him about their experience with hearing loss.

Demers said he loves the technology he gets to work with as a partner with Phonak, and the tours he gets to do now. After traveling for three days to get to WSU, he said he was feeling withdrawals from the rush of a performance on stage.

“I get to live a really fun life,” he said.

Although there is no scheduled meet-and-greet time while Demers is at WSU, he said he would like to extend an invitation to anyone who is interested in talking with him to approach him after the show.

D.J. Demers’ opening show of the “Here to Hear” comedy tour is at 6 p.m. today in the CUB Auditorium. The show is free to attend and open to the public.