Wawa Boy Hits It Big: How Pete Zedlacher Took Northern Ontario to the Comedy Stage

Ask around Wawa and most people can tell you about Pete Zedlacher. Before he became one of the best-known names in Canadian stand-up, he grew up in the town, which sits where Highway 17 bends around the top of Lake Superior.

In the fall of 2010 The Algoma News reported that Zedlacher had two national nominations at once. One was for Best Male Stand-Up at the Canadian Comedy Awards, a category he had already won in 2006. The other was a Gemini Award nomination for Best Individual Performance in a Comedy Program or Series, which put him alongside performers such as Rick Mercer. His family told the paper the Gemini nod meant even more than the comedy award, and his 2006 trophy was on display at home in Wawa.

From Wawa to New York

Zedlacher has described Wawa as a small mining town where he did well in school but was mostly drawn to the school play and late-night TV comedy. After graduating he had to choose between engineering at the University of Toronto and acting school in New York. He picked New York.

At 19 he enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. He studied acting for film, television and the stage, and on weekends he went to Saturday Night Live tapings. After graduating he stayed in New York’s theatre scene for several years, including an Off-Broadway holiday production.

The visa rules for Canadians working in the United States eventually pushed him back north to Toronto. Theatre work there was hard to find, so he started doing stand-up. Toronto had stages every night of the week, and comedy soon became his main career.

A career built on the road

Over the next two decades Zedlacher became a regular on the Canadian comedy circuit:

• Festivals: He performed at Just for Laughs in Montreal and at the Halifax Comedy Festival.
• Troop tours: On Canadian Forces show tours he played for troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the Persian Gulf, and in Alert, Nunavut, the northernmost permanently inhabited place on Earth.
• Television: He wrote and performed for CBC’s The Hour and spent four seasons writing and performing on The Ron James Show.
• Film: He had roles in American Pie: The Naked Mile and George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead.

In 2013 he won SiriusXM’s Top Comic competition and its $25,000 prize. Since 2015 he has headlined the Snowed In Comedy Tour, which plays dozens of towns across the country each winter. Many of those stops are small, northern communities a lot like the one he grew up in.

By 2019 he had six Canadian Comedy Award nominations for Best Male Stand-Up, which puts him among the most-nominated comics in the awards’ history.

Still a Wawa story

Zedlacher has talked about growing up in Wawa in interviews and on stage. Long drives, winters and the closeness of small-town life all show up in his material. He is one of several well-known people from Wawa, along with former NHL players Chris Simon and Denny Lambert.

The headline the paper used in 2010 still works: a kid from a town of a few thousand people on Lake Superior’s north shore built a national career making people laugh.