Twelve years ago a few comedians booked a handful of shows as an excuse to go snowboarding. With 70 shows scheduled for this year, the Snowed in Comedy Tour is now the largest comedy tour in Canada.
Award-winning comedy veteran Pete Zedlacher, who this year will be hitting the road for his fifth Snowed in Comedy, says that performing on the tour really is a dream come true. He also says that the snowboarding has extended to other snow-related sports.
“I think we have like 18 or 20 days of skiing in the first couple of months of the tour,” says Zedlacher. “We spend a week in Whistler, and a few nights in Revelstoke. We hit Mount Washington and Whitewater, up in Fernie. These are the kind of mountains I only saw on TV when I was a kid growing up in Ontario.”
Zedlacher says that part of the reason for the tour’s growth over the years is because the audience really likes the story behind Snowed in Comedy.
“The Snowed in Comedy Tour is a do-it-yourself, fiercely Canadian tour that we put on without any corporate sponsorship, the CBC, or a big comedy festival behind it,” says Zedlacher. “It’s four international touring headliners getting together and doing a broad theatre tour. People get a kick out of it because it’s pretty clear that we love what we do, and that really shows on stage.”
The comedians have a huge advantage being part of the tour, Zedlacher says, because the tour now has a guaranteed crowd.
“Many of them are coming again and again and again,” says Zedlacher. “We’ve already won the audience over before we even hit the stage. When you go to a show at a comedy club, chances are the majority of the audience isn’t going to know who the comic is, so the comedian’s job in the first few minutes is to win them over. We have a huge advantage because we’ve developed an audience that loves us and supports us and there’s an expectation that fans are coming to see the best comedy show in the country.”
The tour has a star-studded lineup this year. Along with Zedlacher, Debra DiGiovanni, Dan Quinn, Damonde Tschritter, Erica Sigurdson, and Paul Myrehaug will be performing most of the tour dates (Tschritter and Sigurdson will not be at the Victoria show). Zedlacher says that it will be a completely different show from years past; he says that his joke-writing process in recent years can be described as “observe and report.”
“I try to live an interesting life and then report back to people what it’s like,” he says. “I always try to find what the audience will relate to. I’m fiercely and proudly Canadian, so a lot of my material is about our country and how we’re seen and represented around the world. That’s what this recent show that I’ve been doing is all about.”
Zedlacher says that he’s seen a cultural shift through his 23 years on stage.
“When I started in the late ’90s, people were warning that political correctness was coming, so comedians can’t say anything anymore,” says Zedlacher. “That was 20 years ago. It’s been around forever. It will always be somewhere in the background, but it doesn’t affect me with any real consequence. I’m not one of those comics who wants to provoke people, or put any group into an awkward position where they’re being made fun of while they’re at my comedy show.”
That said, Zedlacher says that at the end of the day, if it’s funny, it’s funny.
“Everything should be open targets for everybody,” says Zedlacher. “If it’s funny you should be able to tell jokes about it. But personally, I’m just a comic. I just want to be an entertainer. I want to rock a theatre full of 1,500 people, and at the end of the show they give a standing ovation and they walk out thinking they’ve had a great night.”
Snowed in Comedy Tour
8 pm Saturday, January 18
$45, Royal Theatre
rmts.bc.ca