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THE GREAT CANADIAN MALE
RON PEDERSON – The Funnyman
Text: BRUCE WEIR
Intro | SEP 03
One September day eight years ago, Ron Pederson grabbed a jacket, a flashlight and his old retainer and headed out the door. With those props he created an unforgettably funny security guard character for the improv comedy marathon held annually by Edmonton’s Die-Nasty troupe. Booked for a two-hour stint onstage, he hit the wall 32 hours later. A comedian was born.
He wound up joining the Die-Nasty cast (which stages a weekly improvised soap opera of the same name), gaining a reputation for playing maladroit characters with names like Bumbleberry Stick and the Dink. Pederson became a familiar local stage presence, appearing in everything from musicals to the Gothic adventures and offbeat romances of cult playwright Stewart Lemoine.
His theatrical background has allowed Pederson, now 26 and a cast member on the Fox series MADtv , to create detailed characters that reflect comedic influences as varied as SCTV , Jack Lemmon, Neil Simon and Gene Wilder. "My favourite type of comedy is when it just comes out naturally," he says.
At Die-Nasty, Pederson met Joe Flaherty, and in the summer of 2002, he accepted the SCTV veteran’s invitation to appear in an improvised soap opera in Los Angeles. One night, Martin Short appeared as a surprise guest. "I had a killer, killer show, and afterwards Martin Short kind of shook me and said, ‘You’re hilarious! Let’s go drink,’ and he bought me a Rusty Nail," Pederson recalls.
With that cocktail, Pederson hopped onto the Underground Railroad of Canadian comedy: Flaherty introduced him to Short, Short called MADtv executive producer Dick Blasucci, and two days later, Pederson was at the biggest audition of his life.
MADtv viewers have already seen Pederson’s dead-on impersonation of Woody Allen as well as his take on Saddam Hussein. One season in, he’s just starting to hit his stride. "It takes me a little while to put the lampshade on my head and be silly around people," he says. Sounding a bit like Flaherty’s SCTV -era Count Floyd character, Pederson admits, "Acting is scary; comedy is frightening." [ ]
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