Tony Hinchcliffe said his comedy style comes from his hometown.

“It’s Youngstown, for sure. My style is rugged, dark, defiant, honest, and I try to keep it as exciting as possible for the people.”

He brings that style back to his hometown for a performance Friday at Powers Auditorium.

The last time he was on that stage was for his graduation from Ursuline High School in 2002.

“To be able to bring my show to Powers Auditorium, where I barely got to accept my high school diploma,” Hinchcliffe said. “I was a terrible student who was always trying to make the class laugh and annoying my teachers. I bet a lot of them thought I was gonna amount to nothing. I know for a fact that’s what they felt. So I had an I’m-going-to-show-them type of mentality.”

Now Hinchcliffe hosts the podcast “Kill Tony,” which is the most-watched live podcast (last week’s episode had 1.2 million views on YouTube) and is broadcast on Mondays from Austin, Texas. He’s a frequent guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast and opens for him at arenas. Hinchcliffe is playing theaters as a headliner, and he sold out a Texas arena for an upcoming New Year’s Eve broadcast of “Kill Tony.”

It’s a big jump from growing up at 1515 Florencedale Ave. on Youngstown’s North Side. He said he regularly does an online search to make sure the house still exists.

“It’s a miracle it’s still there. I was watching houses get arsoned down when I was a little kid and torn down. I was in the real nuclear centrifuge of the danger zone in Youngstown. I had always just assumed everywhere in the country you could always hear a police siren if you just listened hard enough. I had no idea that was a soundtrack to Youngstown.

“When I got to L.A., I heard on all these rap songs this and that about Compton. I went there and I couldn’t believe it. They have nice green grass on the front yards, no police sirens, no real crime like what I was used to. That’s when I realized I was raised somewhere (expletive) crazy.”

Yeah, the Mahoning County Convention and Visitors Bureau probably isn’t going to hire Hinchcliffe to be its spokesman, but he is looking forward to coming to town the day before the show and enjoying some good Italian food from his mom and dad — “I think Mom already has sauce slowly cooking,” he said on Monday — and getting some Youngstown pizza.

“No one told me where I grew up in Youngstown had the best pizza in the country. They always said New York and Chicago (were best), and they were lying.”

And in its own way, Hinchcliffe’s hometown did fuel his dreams of comedy success.

“In Youngstown, they told you you got to find a trade, whether it’s welding or being an electrician or a plumber or a cop,” he said. “No one told me to dream big and do it.

“But I went to St. Edward School on the north end of Youngstown, which Ed O’Neill’s old house is next to. ‘Married with Children’ was obviously a huge hit when I was growing up. Then I went to Ursuline High School, and Ed O’Neill went there.

“Even though no one’s telling you you could accomplish something huge, I’m seeing Ed O’Neill on TV and I kept telling myself if I’m walking the same hallways as that guy and I’m from the same ‘hood as Boom Boom Mancini, who is boxing royalty, in the back of my mind I’m thinking, who’s to say we can’t do something crazy here.”

That Youngstown childhood also shaped the brand of roasting, insult humor that both fills theaters and garners podcast viewers as well as attracts media backlash and the occasional death threat.

Hinchcliffe described himself as a little kid with a big head growing up. By the time he was in kindergarten, he was used to being taunted with the nickname “Big Head.”

“I had to have a way to make people not want to punch me in the face. One summer I decided, I’m sick of being called ‘Big Head.’ From now on, when I see someone who might make fun of me, I’m going to think of a bunch of ways to make fun of them. If they call me ‘Big Head,’ I’m going to hit them with three, four, five insults at a time, then they’ll never make fun of me again, and it worked out. Turns out people don’t make fun of you if you make everyone laugh at them before or after.”

Hinchcliffe worked as a writer for roasts on Comedy Central and has a take-no-prisoner approach on stage. In his last standup special, “Making Friends,” which was shot at the Comedy Store in La Jolla, California, days before the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, he spends a significant amount of time focused on the one person in the capacity crowd who wasn’t laughing. The woman, her family and their friends ultimately walk out — and the laughter never stops.

Expect jokes about the private submarine accident earlier this year, the Israel-Palestine conflict and transgender athletes, Hinchcliffe said, along with whatever strikes him that night.

In 2021, he was the target of outrage when video surfaced of Hinchcliffe using a racial slur to describe his Asian-American opening act (audience members at his shows now are required to put their cellphones in sealed Yondr bags before entering the theater). A tweet immediately after NBA star Kobe Bryant’s death in 2020 led to death threats (and became a bit in his act).

It’s an approach that was discouraged when he was starting out in the early 2000s, when the goals were to have a clean five minutes to get on a late night talk show or to try to secure a sitcom deal. In a marketplace where many comedy podcasters have a larger audience than those talk shows, it’s a style that thrives.

“If someone tries to cancel somebody for a joke, I think it makes the comedian stronger,” Hinchcliffe said. “Real comedy fans go, ‘What are you offended about?,’ and it draws people toward them … It was crazy, but I was the world news for three days in 2021. I saw the exact same thing happen with those other guys — Shane Gillis, Ari Shaffir, Joe Rogan. When you come after people with good intentions, you make them stronger. It’s an I’m-going-to-show-them mentality. It backfires on these cancel culture people. They’re literally creating comedy Frankensteins. It’s a pretty interesting time to be a comedian.”

If you go …

WHO: Tony Hinchcliffe

WHEN: 7 p.m. Friday

WHERE: Powers Auditorium, 260 W. Federal St., Youngstown

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $29.75 to $44.75 and are available at the DeYor Performing Arts Center box office, online at deyorpac.org and by calling 330-259-9651.