A couple things in Cheeky this week.  Cheekiest Golden Globes moments and The Second City doing a great thing for Haiti relief.

I counted: saw 17 shows at Sketchfest.  Not an extraordinary number considering there were 113 groups, but I still think I saw a lot of great stuff!  I discovered some groups I’d never seen and hatched plans to interview and preview great performers in the future.  A particular highlight, not from Chicago but NYC: BriTANick.  Their videos are hilarious, and the short film they screened was CRAZY INSANE FUNNY, but they really must be seen live for full appreciation.  They know what they’re doing.

On MLK day Matt & I mostly worked from home but then we took a break and went over to our neighbor’s to play the Wii.  Matt’s video of me doing the Rabbids 80’s dance thing made is pretty special.  I’m trying so, SO hard . . . just not quite nailing it.

by Ian Epstein

Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival:

• Lasts only 8 days
• erupts with nearly 150 performers
• consists of nearly 100 troupes
• is calling your name

“We’re creating comedy,” says Brian Posen, the founder and Executive Producer of the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival.  With a head full of curly hair, Posen wears a neatly trimmed beard, a spotless labcoat and a pair of white angel wings, swaying slightly.  He’s standing on a stage in a cloud of fog.  Black horn-rimmed glasses frame his face, giving him the distinguished air you’d expect from a mad, comedic scientist.  A fellow actor, also clad in a labcoat, holds up the machine emitting all this fog.  This is Bri-Ko, one of the sketch comedy troupes participating in the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival.  It’s 4:30pm on Thursday, January 7th, and they’re putting the finishing tech touches on their show.  In three and a half hours the curtain rises simultaneously on three stages to kick off the 9th Annual Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival, or  SketchFest for short.  And Bri-Ko is one of the troupes that Executive Producer and Founder Brian Posen himself will perform in. 

Sketch Comedy – a history course

Hundreds of years ago and late at night, a writer fumbling over a desk with a dim lamp couldn’t think up the right word for an elusive thought.  Blindly, the writer scratches down a word on the page — a word that is not English at all — that is, in fact, Dutch. 

That elusive idea that the writer wrestled with? Lost to history. It definitely wasn’t a perfect drawing or a final draft, “what the Dutch Painters call a schytz” or a “hasty piece.”  No, this was something else .  An idea too flighty for familiarity.  It needed to be lean and light like a single shriek of laughter.  The “first schetse of a comedy,” perhaps.  From its first uses in English, a sketch is something intimately connected with the person who created it.  It is practically incapable of life outside of that person.  And from its first instance, a sketch has always been about the ability to get across a lot of ideas using a combination of speed and variety – it’s a quick bit of ingenuity or an outline traced in midair. 

What is sketch comedy?

Is it improv?  In a word: no.  Sketch Comedy involves reams of paper full of words and tons of ideas put forward in these things that you might call scripts.  You’d be mistaken, though, since these scripts, animated by the writers who wrote them and appreciated by the audience that views them, become what they call sketchs. 

Sketches of what, though?  Of movies?  Sometimes.  A TV mini-series?  A full on farce à la Moliere with costumes?  A song cycle or an extended piece of silent, physical comedy?  Commedia dell’arte for the new decade?    A made for TV movie performed live with two people playing ten roles?   Are these sketches just blueprints for knock knock jokes?  Does each maybe contain some shard or kernel from the source of all knock knock jokes ever?

The sketches, Posen explains, differ as widely as the troupes that perform them.  He continues, adding that sketch is the comedic form that is all the rage in the comedy scene these days.  Talking quickly, he runs through history, stopping here and there to point out trends in American comedy with insight and nonchalance. The 80s were all about stand up, he observes, and the 90s saw the rise of improvisation as the ruling form well  into the recently closed out naughts, where the sketch takes off around the time as SketchFest’s 2001 inaugural year.

SketchFest comes to Chicago

Back in 2001, Posen, working as a producer, booked a stage at Theatre Building Chicago to put up a musical by the Chicago writing duo Philip LaZebnik and Kingsley Day .  The musical was an ambitious production called Aztec Human Sacrifice.  But the bottom fell out and Posen was left with a reserved stage at Theatre Building Chicago.  There were no other takers for the stage and nothing was waiting in the wings.  So Posen hopped on the phone and sent emails to his sketch comedy friends and about a month later the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival met with huge success.  Posen possesses that rare, inspiring combination of an actor’s energy, a comedian’s wit, a teacher’s patience, and an off-hand eloquence that allows him to talk about the traditions of comedy and connect them to complex theories about how theater should work, theories that an academic might trace back to Brecht or far beyond. 

Over its elongating history (who knows what’s in store for next year’s 10 year anniversary…), there have been a variety of trends in what SketchFest emphasizes.  2010 marks an explosion of kid-centric sketch offerings for groups of kids and by groups of kids spilling across the stages by day.

But be sure not to go to a late night show expecting family-friendly content.  Posen warns that sketch, a theatrical form that draws its energy from aggression and hostility before turning it into satirical gold, is largely rated R or PG (depending upon the parent or the rating organization).

In a lot of ways, SketchFest resembles a professional conference — where comedy is the currency of choice and the CEOs appear in clown noses or costumes.  Posen and the SketchFest staff bring together a select panel of performance professionals (only half of the groups that apply make the cut) who gather to discuss and workshop the finer points of their craft.  And a huge part of sketch comedy’s beauty is that the craft is so self-effacing — the better its done, the harder you laugh.  You don’t marvel at the delivery of a particularly difficult line so much as you crumple to the floor crying hysterically.  The countless hours spent slaving over the placement of punchlines in a script or perfecting what is too often perceived as the innate mystery of comic timing fall by the wayside; comedy’s most audible byproduct isn’t applause, it’s laughter. 

Chicago Theater Blog Recommends

(Don’t be afraid to read about the groups or check out the schedule.  Take a look at the Kids friendly offerings!  And remember — they all passed the preliminary inspections so any group is a safe bet!)

By now, there should be some 2010 update.  Super busy.  Here are 5 quick things from January:

1) Matt’s birthday.  Some people came over to play Guitar Hero Metallica in pajamas.  Yes, you can fashion an entire party concept around these:

2) Planning April trip to NYC.  We’ll see Opeth and stay 5 days visiting friends & family.  Miss home.  Sadly I just saw that the Yankees are traveling that weekend.  But we may check us out some Jason Bay over in Queens, Matt being an NL fan anyway.

3) Sketchfest.  Here’s my preview and an interview in Cheeky, and I’m in the midst of seeing more shows and writing more.

4) Joined the Welles Park gym.  I like it for its bare bones look & feel (think that little weight room in high school) and its laid back but athletic Lincoln Square crowd (so far nobody’s hogging the treadmills just to walk the whole time — the ultimate urban gym faux pas).  We’re supposed to be on our way there in like half an hour…

5) Still at work on a video about City Farm, a project I’m loving.  Maybe this year I’ll finally live my dream of planting tomatoes on the deck.

Gotta go.

Tomorrow marks the start of the Ninth Annual Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival. Each year, over the course of two weeks, 100+ sketch comedy troupes perform 125+ shows in the sketch center of the Universe. That’s a lot of sketch.

In 2007 Pizza Infinity made an 18-episode web-series taking a look behind-the-scenes at Sketchfest.

You’ll find a full list of YouTube and Vimeo links after the jump.

YouTube links:
Episode #01 – Welcome to Chicago
Episode #02 – Energy Guys
Episode #03 – Keilly & Roeters (and Raimi)
Episode #04 – Ms. Chickaburns
Episode #05 – Emo Philips*
Episode #06 – OneTwoThree
Episode #07 – Interview Style
Episode #08 – Freedumb
Episode #09 – Performance Anxiety
Episode #10 – Party Central USA
Episode #11 – Bathroom Break
Episode #12 – Triplette
Episode #13 – Guest Correspondent
Episode #14 – Now Fear This
Episode #15 – After Parties
Episode #16 – Sketchcore
Episode #17 – What do you love about the Chicago Sketchfest?
Episode #18 – Sketchubator

*Emp Philips graciously allowed us to use his interview for a long time but eventually (45,000+ views later) asked us to remove the video from YouTube—thanks Emo!

You can also watch the whole series on Vimeo: 2007 Chicago Sketchfest

Many of my friends are performing again this year including OneTwoThree, Not From Baltimore, Off Off Broadzay, Tim & Micah, The Cupid Players and Bri-Ko. I highly recommend them all.

Find the full schedule at www.chicagosketchfest.net.

Now…I know the “Gentlemen of Long Pork” might sound a tad questionable to some of you….but… Foundation’s Zoran Gvojic and his sketch comedy group, Long Pork, have been accepted to appear in San Francisco’s SKETCHFEST this January!!

And get this…they’re opening for SNL’s Rachel Dratch! We are thrilled for Zoran and his troop of…gentlemen…

For any Chicagoans that want a chance to see the show, they will be performing one night at Chicago’s Sketchfest!

I do this sometimes – I get bored, and so I make people I know join me at an oekaki site (actually ‘owned’ by Ensei and Duster) and doodle.  I did that last night.  It was cool, and I think I got a character out of it. =D

Just gonna upload them funny-new-gallery style.

Themes: something with religion, Natsume Takashi from Natsume Yuujinchou, Tieria Erde from Gundam 00, non-human/with cat ears, elements (earth, wind, fire).

This Thursday when the members of Bad Hair take the stage, it may only be their 4th time playing this annual show, but it will be their final night in a long line of laughs.

The sketch comedy group has been a steady fixture on the local scene for many years, having performed at the Adrienne, Trocadero, Painted Bride, the Khyber, World Cafe Live and many other venues throughout the city. They’ve launched many successful runs of Fringetastic Sketchtacular for the Philly Fringe and were most recently seen at the Philly SketchFest.

Thursday night will be presented as Best Of… featuring a selection memorable favorites from past shows.

A FAREWELL TO BAD HAIR SKETCH COMEDY
Thursday, Jan 29th @ 9PM | $20
Theatre N @ Nemours | 11th & Tatnall Sts, Wilmington, DE

Hey Chicago!

Remember Team Submarine? You don’t?! Then how the hell did you find your way to our blog? Nonetheless, we remember you. We also remember that time you borrowed $12 from us. But we’ve decided to forget about it as long as you come to one of our shows this weekend. As we’ll be making a brief return to do some shows at the Chicago Sketchfest and The Lincoln Lodge.

We’ve been preparing an all-new for Sketchfest, and you’ve got two chances to catch! Friday, January 9th and Saturday, January 10th both at 11:00 PM. It’s at the Theatre Building Chicago on 1225 W Belmont. We can confidently say that if you miss this show, it’ll probably be one of the five things you regret the most in your life. Or at least that weekend. Tickets are twelve dollars, but it’s a full show, so it ends up coming out to something like $8 a laugh. You can find a Facebook event for it here.

But if you have children or are a child and can’t make the 11:00 PM show, then you’ve got a chance to catch us doing a set at The Lincoln Lodge on Friday, January 9 at 9:00 PM. This show will also feature the triumphant returns of Brady Novak and TJ Miller.

But if you can’t make any of those shows, we’re gonna try and do a show INSIDE OF THE MILLENNIUM PARK BEAN (still working on the permits – the city is being seriously difficult).

And just for kicks, why not read the article that we wrote for Time Out Chicago about Sketchfest last year?

As we mentioned earlier, we’re super stoked for this weekend when sketch comedy takes center stage at the Philly Sketchfest. In the excitement leading up to the event, we’re seeing a lot of talk about the state of comedy in the city, the scene and what we can look forward to not only this weekend, but beyond. Here are a couple of must reads for the sketchophiles out there:

Comic Vs. Audience interview with Dave Terruso & Matt Lally

Phillyist interview with Dave Terruso

This weekend marks a special first in Philadelphia’s alt-comedy scene. Dave Terruso, Matt Lally & Ben Maher have come together to produce Philadelphia’s first ever Philly Sketchfest, running this Friday and Saturday at the Painted Bride.

Over the last year, events like Die Actor Die and Bedtime Stories have created not only awesome comedy, but also some excited networking between the city’s sketch comedians. The result is a culmination of talent featuring eight groups taking the stage in what promises to be two nights of exciting hilarity.

The event is hosted by comic Chip Chantry (Ministry of Secret Jokes) and features sketch groups Animosity Pierre, Bad Hair, the Gentleman’s Rotary Auxiliary, Meg & Rob, Rowan & Hastings, Secret Pants, the Sixth Borough and the Waitstaff.

Philly Sketchfest ‘08
Fri, 6/6 @ 9PM | Sat, 6/7 @ 8PM & 10:30PM
Painted Bride Arts Center | 230 Vine St
Tickets: $15-$25

This past Saturday the Sketchfest here in SF featured an fiveman collective from called the Whitest Kids U’ Know. Up until I got the schedule for the fest I hadn’t heard of them, now I can’t get enough.

Their stuff is absurdist, and above all else very, very tight. Both in the hip-hop sense of the word and the timing.

Oh, go see for yourself:

What Really Happened To Abraham Lincoln [Almost SFW]

Slow Jerk [NSFW, oh SO NSFW]

Which are even better live, hate to brag.

Dinosaur Rap [NSFW, that is if your workplace would be tense about the world's first rap song about getting high with dinosaurs]

Really, if the opportunity to see them live occurs: TAKE IT! The DVD of their first season woth of shows will be out in early February.

I know, I know… I PROMISED I’d do this yesterday.

Well truth is that I barely had time to catch any of the show Monday night. This means that I, like you, will have to wait for the podcast. I did manage to sneak in for the opening few minutes of his segment with Merlin Mann, which was extra great thanks to the MacWorld expo attendee in his mid-fifties who was the only person in the entire Eureka other than myself to laugh when Merlin pulled out his Hipster PDA. Note that his 11 week old daughter is the biggest 11 week old I’ve ever seen. 10 pounds at birth, and his wife is not a large woman. The baby is also the most alert 11 week old I’ve ever encountered.

I also caught the end of Danny Hoch’s segment. All I can say of about that is WOW- I need to see his show at Berkeley Rep. He had this great allegory about gentrification and the redevelopment of New York (and other urban areas) that invoked the image of a castle, serfs, and a moat that I just can’t do justice to. Not yet anyway… that’s going to be worth tuning into all by its lonesome.

Then there was the bonus of hearing Zach Rogue of Rogue Wave do a solo acoustic set. I actually hadn’t heard of them, not being tapped into the music scene, and I doubted that most of the surprisingly older slanting crowd had either. That didn’t keep the entire room from being totally rapt when Zach sang Endless Shovel. Even MacWorld dude was nodding his head.

Plus I didn’t get to see any of Bucky Sinister or Morgan Murphy, so the show is going to be a near total surprise to me. Good thing I’m already subscribed on iTunes!

Great show, Jesse, you made a fan out outta this Guy.

Two sold-out shows again this year (3-3) as Big News brings their Year-In-Review show to the Chicago Sketchfest. There’s also a completely different and new show TONIGHT in Hollywood. How do they do what they do?

A couple of things.  First:  We’ll be performing an almost entirely new show this weekend at the Chicago Sketchfest.  Friday at 8:00 and Saturday at 9:00.  Same show each night.  Details here.

Also, if you’re a reader of Time Out Chicago, you may have noticed a certain article on page 66 in this week’s issue.  If you’re not a reader of Time Out Chicago, you most likely would not have noticed it.  And if that’s the case, you can read it here.  It’s an article we wrote about preparing for Sketchfest.  It also has a picture that shows how ridiculously taller Nate is than Steve.  Despite some editorial battles (they wouldn’t allow a full-frontal picture of Steve tearing out an elk’s lungs with his penis), we’re very pleased with it.   Thanks very much to Steve Heisler and Time Out Chicago.

You can currently buy the issue at places that sell Time Out Chicago.  And feel free to write Time Out and violently demand more articles from us.

Oh my god, every funny person alive (practically) is going to be at SF Sketchfest January -10-27.

In preparation for SketchFest NYC, amNewYork spoke with Chris Principe, 27, and Jeff Solomon, 26, two members of the New York-based five-piece sketch comedy group Elephant Larry, which formed in 2002.

There is nobody named Larry in the group, nor are there elephants.

They will be performing Saturday, June 9 at 10pm.

How do you define sketch comedy?
Jeff: I think what’s funny about sketch comedy is that people tend to know what it is, and not know that they know, actually. So if you say, “Oh, it’s like Saturday Night Live,” they’re like, “Oh, that thing, yeah.” And then if people don’t like SNL, you say, “It’s like SNL, but funny.”

Chris: [SketchFest] is cool, because you get to see a lot of different groups, and yeah, it’s all sketch comedy, but there are so many different ways to take it that you don’t realize. And especially for outsiders, people who aren’t familiar with the form. It’s so much more than Saturday Night Live.

Can you describe a typical Elephant Larry show for someone who’s never seen you before?
Jeff: We try to keep our shows pretty short and sweet, and hopefully leaving people wanting more. Generally our sketch shows don’t have a clear, overarching theme. It’ll usually be disparate ideas. Probably not the kind of recurring-character sketch that you see on SNL, but more like something like The State or one of the newer shows out there like Human Giant. And we’ll do live sketches interspersed with videos, so that we try to have a seamless 45 minutes.

How has the growth of sketch comedy in New York affected Elephant Larry?
Chris: It’s funny, it’s like everybody has a comedy group now. It’s kind of like the equivalent of a rock band. You’ll see groups everywhere, just popping up. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t look at it in that competitive way. You can go any night of the week and see a sketch comedy show, and specifically sketch, not even improv or standup. It makes sense, kind of, that sketch has really grown.

What are your comedy influences?
Jeff: I think for me, Looney Tunes is actually a big influence, particularly Chuck Jones’ stuff. His cartoons in the mid-’50s,¬ to get particularly nerdy about it,¬ are very inspiring to me. They have a strong emphasis on writing, and they kind of played with the conventional notion of these characters, and broke the fourth wall and did a lot of the meta-humor stuff that is pretty prevalent nowadays, and was really ahead of its time back then.

Are you guys funny in everyday life?
Chris: No! Oh God, no. No, I will immediately talk seriously about anything.

Jeff: It’s that pizza place analogy of working at a pizzeria all day, and you don’t wanna go home and have pizza for dinner.

Describe the process of writing and performing a sketch.
Chris: Usually, it’s just whatever makes us laugh. It’s kind of the curse of the comedian, in a way, where you have this one moment of the natural joy of the joke. ‘Oh, that’s really funny. Can this work on stage?’ And it immediately becomes a mathematical thing.

Jeff: You immediately have to analyze why it’s funny. One second of laughter, and then we start working on it. It’s a cool journey though, because the first time when that joke hits — it’s great for us, and we love it. And then we write and we work on it, and then finally when we get to put it up on stage that first time, it’s realizing that it’s funny again –¬ hopefully. It kind of comes full circle.

Do you have any favorite sketches?
Jeff: I have a sketch that I love to do that everybody hates, including the audience. That would be Giant Venus Flytrap Land, in which I play a clerk at the Ikea customer service desk, and this customer is angry because he didn’t get his couch delivered. He got a huge clay flowerpot delivered to him, and that¹s because his items got switched with a customer in Giant Venus Flytrap Land.

Chris: And how does that sketch usually go over?

Jeff: Terribly, actually! Everybody hates it. I love it.

How does Elephant Larry still keep it fresh, when you’ve been performing together for so long?
Chris: I think the humor of the group has kind of evolved and changed, as we’ve changed too. I know that sounds kind of corny. We always make each other laugh. I guess it’s like a relationship ¬ you find new ways to fall in love with each other. And we’re all in it for the long haul. I respect the other guys in the group immensely — and I trust those guys, and they trust me too, at least I think.

Jeff: Well, we started out as friends, and I think that definitely has something to do with it. I hear about a lot of groups starting because they’ve taken a class together, or sometimes classes actually form groups even when people don’t necessarily select to be part of it. And the five of us knew each other in college, we were writing comedy together in college with a larger group, and we saw in each other a commonality in our sense of humor. The fact that we sought that out as friends definitely has a huge amount to do with it.

What is it about SketchFest that keeps you coming back for a third year?
Jeff: The crowds are great, and because it’s a festival and because it takes place in a different part of the city than some of the places where we’ve taken residence over the years, it brings in different crowds. I think we always end up making new fans and new friends whenever we do the festival.

Chris: It’s also got a real convention-like feel to it. The shows are awesome — but it’s also the opportunity to see a lot of groups doing different things with the same kind of form, from all over the country.

Jeff: It’s a chance to see our friends.

This interview was published June 8, 2007 online only at www.amny.com, in conjunction with a feature article about SketchFest NYC.