The COVID-19 pandemic shut down most entertainers’ careers. It made comedian Anthony Rodia a star.

Like everyone else, Rodia lost his performing jobs — 155 gigs were canceled. But he realized people only could go for so long stuck in their homes with nothing to watch except for “‘Tiger King’ and that rolling death clock on the news stations,” he said during a telephone interview Tuesday from Florida’s Gulf Coast, where he waited to find out what impact another impending disaster — Hurricane Idalia — might have on his performance plans this week.

Rodia started posting videos to YouTube and social media, initially one a week, then a couple a week before starting a 93-day streak with a new video each day with Rodia portraying himself, Uncle Vinny, Zia Lucia and other characters inspired by his Italian family.

He would get an idea and would post a teaser online at midday, forcing himself to create a completed video to post that evening.

“I was getting 25,000 to 60,000 new followers a week,” Rodia said. “That’s when the audience really shot up. People still come up to me two, three years later thanking me for helping them to escape from that harsh reality.”

Some of the videos, like Uncle Vinny’s reaction to the Pope “canceling” Easter due to the pandemic, attracted more than a million views on YouTube and were shared across various social media platforms. When he returned to touring, cities where he used to play one show for about 200 people, he now was selling out 10 club shows. These days Rodia is playing mostly casinos and theaters, including a show Sept. 15 at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown.

Rodia, 43, loved comedy from a young age. Andrew Dice Clay, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Rodney Dangerfield, Eddie Murphy and, especially, Robin Williams, were among his favorites. But he also grew up in a large Italian family, so big that he wasn’t exactly sure how many brothers and sisters his grandfather had (he thought grandpa was one of 15 children).

“His siblings had kids. Their kids had kids. There was an enormous amount of cousins, and it was non-stop ball-breaking, busting chops,” Rodia said.

He enjoyed being the life of the party and making everyone laugh. But except for doing a set at a comedy club open mic after a relative dared him to see if he could make strangers laugh, he didn’t think he could give comedy the time the old-timers said it demanded. He became the finance manager at a luxury car dealership instead.

Years later, the movie “Deadpool” rekindled his desire.

“The whole place, a packed theater, was laughing hysterically, and something came over me. I have to do standup. I want to do to a room what this movie is doing to this theater.”

He rented a performing arts theater in White Plains, N.Y., that seated 430 people, called everyone he knew and sold it out. He got signed to a small booking agency and for a while he kept his job at the car dealership, hoping the comedy would bring in an extra $1,000 a month that could put toward golfing. Eventually, the side gig was bringing in more money than his main job, and he decided to pursue comedy full-time.

The one person who wasn’t laughing was his wife.

“There was a lot of yelling — all from her end.”

Rodia believes those years working at a car dealership made him better prepared to market himself as a comedian than if he’d started when he was younger. He also has more life experience to draw upon now. His ethnic family still is an inspiration for his act, although he’s now focused on broadening his audience. And the reason he called his current run of shows the Totally Relatable Tour is because so many people tell him they had similar experiences even though the accents are different.

“My audience is so diverse now,” Rodia said. “Growing up, I thought it was my family, but so many of us were raised like that. No one was coddled.”

Two weeks after his performance in Youngstown, Rodia is recording his first standup comedy special. He’s talked to a couple of different streaming platforms, but he doesn’t want to relinquish creative control, so he’s handling the up-front costs himself and will look for a distributor after it’s finished.

That doesn’t mean Youngstown will be a tune up for the recorded special. Rodia said he isn’t sure what he’ll be doing in Youngstown or even which bits he wants to record.

“I don’t do the same show, all my shows are different,” he said. “A lot of comedians, you could see them three times in a year and they’ll do the same jokes in the same order and the same bits. A couple weeks ago, a couple came to see my show on Friday and again on Saturday, and he was annoyed — annoyed — because he wanted to hear the story I told about my wife the first night and I did 30 minutes of new material … I’m not really a formatted person.”

If you go …

WHO: Anthony Rodia: Totally Relatable Tour

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 15

WHERE: Stambaugh Auditorium, 1000 Fifth Ave., Youngstown.

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $49 to $69 and are available at the DeYor Performing Arts Center box office and online at experience

yourarts.org.