Since I’ve covered sketches that were firmly conceived for television thus far, I thought I’d go a little bit further back for something a little more classic. To many people, the names “Abbot and Costello” are synonymous with “Who’s On First?”, perhaps the most famous bit of American comedy ever produced. It’s justly influential, and as such I’ve decided there’s really no reason to cover it or analyze it further. So instead, let’s look at a different bit from the same duo, one that also showcases their strengths. (Technically, there’s a difference between a skit, a bit, and a sketch, but for my purposes I’m going to count this as a “sketch”. My blog series, my rules.).

In his sci-fi comedy novel The Road to Mars, Eric Idle expounded on the theory of the White Face/Red Nose approach to comedy duos: in circuses, the clown with the white face was the one throwing the pie, and the clown with the red nose was the one getting hit in the face with it. What’s fascinating is how this essential duo shows up all over the world in different comedy settings, from Italian commedia dell’arte to Chinese crosstalk routines. Whether it’s a stern parent and an unruly child, a mean teacher and a motormouthed student, an army colonel and a goofy cadet or whatever other calculus you wish, the roots are often the same.

And speaking of calculus, our sketch today centers around crooked math and the way a shifty trickster character tries to beat the system. You don’t need to know Abbot and Costello’s stage personas to enjoy this  bit, since they’re instantly recognizable, but it helps. Abbott is the raspy-voiced crank, Costello is the whining loudmouth with the New York accent, and the crux of the sketch hinges on a challenge from one to the other.

Like many vaudeville bits, this one has many iterations. I’m using this particular version from YouTube because it has a live audience and does, in fact, feature both Bud and Lou, unlike some of the other variations you can find. Nevermind the stuff at the beginning about the passport and the angry landlord: the meat of this sketch comes from nimble delivery and the chemistry between its performers. Abbott and Costello are justly famous for both.

Costello, in his shabby suit and puffed-up hat, has to prove that he paid seven weeks’ worth of rent with just $28 (the actual rent amount he owes is only $91, which in 2018 wouldn’t even pay my January electric bill for a two-bedroom apartment). First he tries division, in a sequence that gets the biggest laughs from me, where he makes a big deal out of the physical size of the numbers on the chalkboard (“That’s a cute little two! I’m not gonna push that big seven into that little two!”). I love the way he seems to revel in pissing off Abbott, who just wants him to get on with it, already. This is actually a genius move because it stokes the Tall Scowly One’s impatience so much that it increases what Costello can get away with. Using the tried and true techniques of asking his mark for permission and varying the pace of his patter, Costello magically gets the right numbers to appear on the board, and that’s all that matters to him. The audience roars with applause (“Don’t encourage him, please!”).

Not to be outdone, Abbott asks him to do it again with multiplication this time. This is a perfect escalation, because the straight man is now so confident that he’s calling the shots that he doesn’t notice Costello switching the game up until it’s too late, adding two of the numbers at the last minute to get 28. Finally, Abbott demands addition and counts the threes himself: there’s no possible way he can screw this up. Just as he’s about to triumphantly prove Costello wrong, Lou swoops in with the punchline, again beating his foil and producing 28. By the time we’ve processed what he’s done he’s streaked across the finish line, leaving chaos in his wake.

American comedy and vaudeville in particular is infatuated with the idea of fast-talking con-men, including Mark Twain’s hustler characters, Bugs Bunny, and even someone like Tony Stark. The Founding Fathers themselves are often portrayed as scrappy heroes pit against the establishment. There’s an undeniable dark side to these kinds of performances,  from their links to minstrel shows to the parallels in Trumpism and demogogues, but something about the joy of this specific routine is downright infectious. I believe that everyone who strives to write comedy secretly wants to create something as well-constructed as an old-time back and forth like this.

What makes a sketch dated? It might seem like there’s no surer way to give your work a sell-by date than by inserting references and characters that are ripped from the headlines of a moment, but I would argue that ideas and attitudes age worse than names and events. As a recent revisit to the Al Gore “lock box” bit has proved for me, SNL’s best political bits can still funny even years after their original air date if there’s a deeper logic and purpose under all the jabs.

Take In Living Color, the 90’s show that helped launch the Wayans family, David Alan Grier and Jim Carrey into stardom. On the one hand, many of its sketches traffic in jokes that trade on gay, sexist and racial stereotypes in a way that have not aged very well, even though this was hardly the only show to benefit from this. At the same time, we have sketches like “The Wrath of Farrakhan”, which nods to some positively ancient cultural figures (by today’s standards) while staging a surprisingly relevant parable about inequality in entertainment.

To understand this sketch, you really only need to be familiar with two things: original series Star Trek and Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan (and if you don’t know the latter, the sketch helpfully explains who he is for you). I imagine that once the writers noticed the inescapable pun with Wrath of Khan the rest kind of fell into place. In 2018, this bit fits comfortably alongside the Black Mirror “USS Callister” episode and the ongoing conversations about privilege and representation, while still being quite funny and including such memorable lines as “Are you out of your Vulcan mind?” pronounced with a soft “f”.

The sketch itself pits the original Enterprise crew, led, of course, by Captain James T. Kirk (Jim Carrey) against the minister (Damon Wayans) and two of his cohorts, who beam aboard to confront the captain about the oppression on his bridge. The real life Farrakhan has said plenty of objectionable things, and other In Living Color sketches would poke fun at his paranoia and antisemitic rhetoric. Here, though, Wayans’ impression is merely a device (albeit a fun one) to voice problems that many people of color have likely had with Star Trek’s supposedly “utopian” vision of the future from the beginning. Or, as Wayans puts it, “it is that same lie that’s got white boys rapping and the Fat Boys acting“.

As Carrey’s Kirk overacts to superhuman levels, Farrakhan stokes mutiny among the crew. It’s hard to argue against him. For example, if Lieutenant Uhura (played by Kim Wayans here) is an equal member of the team, how come she’s mainly a glorified secretary (and, as the sketch puts it “occasional chocolate fantasy”) for Kirk? In its original airdate, the character of Uhura was seen as revolutionary, but in hindsight much of her significance comes from simply existing rather than being given much agency as a character, at least until later media.

The same goes for Mr. Sulu (Kipp Shiotai), who lists off the ethnic slurs he’s had to endure under the Kirk regime. While the humor here does depend on objectifying women and assigning racial cliches to Uhura and Sulu (sassy black woman and “horny Asian brother”, respectively), you could argue that this is all part of the point. Kirk is perfectly fine with stereotyping his crew as long as they don’t challenge his authority. Plus, Sulu’s despair at being denied the chance to “do the nasty” with any of the show’s infamous sexy alien ladies echoes more recent concerns about the lack of romantic lead roles for Asian men.

Once David Alan Grier’s Spock calls him a “Caucasoid”, Kirk makes one last attempt to get Farrakhan off his ship, but ends up whimpering like a little child and running off to his room as the minister takes the captain’s seat. Even in a parody, even knowing the baggage of Farrakhan, the final sight of the spaceship traveling to Sylvia’s Soul Food Shack with the hypermasculine Kirk dethroned is strangely inspiring.

I always feel like I’m killing the actual jokes in these sketches by analyzing them. There’s so much to be said about this piece before you even touch on how funny it is. Damon Wayans’ Farrakhan would reappear several times in future In Living Color episodes, which makes the audience’s immediate response to him all the more remarkable. They’re not laughing because they’ve seen his other sketches, since this was only the show’s second episode. And all the supporting actors are great, from Farrakhan’s call-and-response cronies to the rest of the Enterprise crew.  There’s also a neat inversion going on here: the original Captain Kirk was always lauded for being human and emotional, but Carrey’s version acts more like a scrawny malfunctioning robot than a real person. Naturally, this lets the normally “alien” Spock come across as a level-headed dude with some good points to make (at least one person involved with this must have been a legit Trek fan, too, for there to be a reference to Nimoy being “a better director” than Shatner).

Trek heads have long rhapsodized about creator’s Gene Roddenberry’s supposedly hopeful, multiracial vision of the future, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been perceived the same way by every viewer. A sketch like this reminds us that Hollywood often expects people of color to be satisfied with negligible progress while it insists on putting white people front and center. In its own way, this sketch is both subversive and optimistic, and damn if it doesn’t make me feel like there’s still a chance to use science fiction  to empower the less privileged. Wouldn’t that be Vulcan grand?

The miracles of teh YouTubes mean that I can be intimately familiar with a sketch show’s material without ever even having seen an entire episode. That’s how I feel about Baroness Von Sketch Show, a Canadian group I really like and know solely through individual bits as opposed to their actual IFC program. Maybe that means I’m not the best source of information about them, but I at least know their stuff well enough at this point that it was tough deciding which of their sketches to write about, seeing as there are multiple contenders (you will almost certainly hear more about them if this series continues).

I’ve decided to go with this one mainly because it involves the entire ensemble and shows some of the group’s strengths. During a lunch break, an office worker (Jennifer Whalen) asks an orange-eating employee (Carolyn Clifford-Taylor) to join her for a quick jaunt up and down the stairs so they can meet the requirements of her Fitbit, only to find out that her friend plans to nap instead, since her Fitbit says she’s missing sleep. The idea that the logic of the Fitbit could justify all sorts of questionable behavior is enough to justify a sketch in itself, but things take a turn as we see other variations. Another woman apparently named “Shosh” (Aurora Browne) explains that she’s wearing a “Fatbit” to measure “every time society body shames me” before sorrowfully eating a sandwich. We also learn about similar devices for tracking sex and fun before we get to the punchline, delivered by final group member Meredith MacNeill, which is so good that I’m not even going to reveal it here because you should really just watch the sketch yourself. Come on. It’s less than a minute.

Having seen almost all of the other IFC Baroness sketches currently on YouTube that I can while living in this country, I like how many of the group’s trademarks appear in even this simple bit. Whalen often gets to rattle off declarative bits of dialogue like here and she’s a pro at it, while Browne is a master of facial expressions (she does something similar when she sadly eats a blob of birthday cake frosting in this similar sketch). Clifford-Taylor and MacNeill’s roles aren’t as tied to their recurring traits, but I will say that many of the group’s sketches follow a tried and true path of ramping up to a big payoff and delivering spectacularly. Punchlines are, in my experience, supremely hard to write, which is why, I suspect, many comedy troupes today avoid them altogether in favor of non-sequiturs, segues, or, in the case of SNL, the camera just dollying back toward the crowd to indicate that the sketch is now over. Baroness clearly cares about its writing as much as performing and that always gets points in my book. The final shot of the original duo’s silent reactions is perfectly timed, too, as Whalen clutches her wrist in shame while her friend downs an orange slice like a Tequila shot.

In a larger sense, it’s a great sketch because it takes so many turns while still sticking to a coherent premises. This could have easily ended with a simple shot of all of the women back at work carrying out what their respective trackers tell them to do. Instead, we get a harsh rejoinder that really shows how powerless everyone else in this situation feels. It echoes a theme that comes up in other Baroness sketches, that the greatest freedom a woman can gain comes from not giving a shit, a near-impossible task when society is constantly holding you to unobtainable standards and every thing you do seems like a tell. The fact that I heard someone quoting this very sketch today on the train proves that real people I don’t know are into this group, so hopefully the Baronesses will continue exploring the many ways we’re all dying inside for a long time. Meanwhile I will try to search for a legal, artist-supporting way to watch the actual show itself. If only they awarded visas to help you get caught up on TV…

The more you workshop pieces as a comedy performer, the more you realize that nothing you work on is ever truly finished. That being said, there are some sketches that come damn near close to perfection, and this one, from the very first episode of “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” from 1987, is a great example of using every single second of a piece to its fullest potential.

The Fry and Laurie of the title are writer/scholar/gay icon/general force for good Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, known to most as House but also a musician and adorable scruffball in his own right. The two have instantly recognizable chemistry together and put their own spin on the classic “straight guy/goofball” dynamic that seems inescapable to any pair of people who tries to do jokes together.

Unlike most double-act bits, though, this sketch is a game of agreement. Dressed in matching trenchcoats and apparently playing older men (although there’s no real attempt to portray this) the two of them lament the fact that “gay” no longer means what it used to mean. It used to be such a lovely word! And so, it turns out, were several other words, before they were overtaken by same sex hedonists, including “pouffy”, “arse bandit” and even “homosexual”. The punchline, that the two men are about to go meet some “screaming benders” for gay sex, is inevitable but not overly predictable, and everything leading up to it opens like a trapdoor from one escalation to the other.

There’s so much to unpack here. Despite the fact that each character is basically the same, there are so many moments where delivery makes a line sing (Laurie’s dramatic love for “the GREAT BRITISH SENTENCE” or Fry’s “it’s one of the great words!”). The very first joke doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the bit (and doesn’t get much of a laugh) but sets up the interplay. It’s filled with lots of ideas, too, from the notion that language is constantly evolving (something Fry in particular seems to be obsessed with) to the always-relevant parody of those people pining for an innocence that never existed. “If only I didn’t have to think about all these people who aren’t like me” may have well been the rallying cry for the people who voted a certain terrifying demagogue into the White House last year. The punchline also points at the rank hypocrisy that especially seems to crop up among those who target homosexual people as long as their own lives don’t have to change.

One of the things that fascinates me about comedy is the way it appears in different places around the world. In my amateur research, it feels like every culture has some variety of this setup: two people playing off each other. You can see the joy of performing immediately here, and it becomes more evident as the two of them get to switch voices and inflections to give examples of different sentences “My word, Jane, the garden’s looking quite homohsexual this morning”) throughout their rant. The whole thing starts at a ten as far as energy levels go and only gets bigger, louder and crazier from ther

Sketches like this are almost inspiring in a way, and capture so much of what comedic inversions of logic can do. Fry & Laurie would go on to create all sorts of work that challenges or departs from standard duo setups. This bit shows that old structures can still work in a modern setting. And keep the change.

I like comedy. Do you like comedy? Not everyone does. But as someone who appreciates short stories, comic ideas and sharing YouTube videos, I’ve decided to do a series about the 50 sketches I consider among the best I’ve ever witnessed. These won’t be ranked and won’t come in any particular order, but since I’m trying to encapsulate a whole range of different styles and performers, chances are something you like will pop up on this list eventually. We begin today with a 2006 sketch from Derrick Comedy, the group that gave us the erstwhile Childish Gambino and Troy from Community, Donald Glover.

Derrick has more famous sketches, but this is the one that sticks with me the most. It’s very old-fashioned in its approach and feels almost like a vaudeville bit as filmed in someone’s living room on a home video camera. The same year this sketch appeared, the 23-year-old Glover would get hired as a writer for 30 Rock, setting the course for his future superstardom, and I can imagine him using this, at least in the early days, as a kind of sizzle real for everything he can do in a single clip.

The premise here is very simple. Donald Glover plays a modern day hatmaker who decides to practice his craft “the old fashioned way”, even though we’re told that this has led to previous hatters losing their sanity. It’s all really just a way to play out someone’s slow escape from reality, and what makes it is Glover’s commitment to what he’s doing as his actions gradually get more absurd.

Each ridiculous thing he says is delivered with a completely straight face, as if he’s speaking a different language (the line “slimy. What’s for dessert?” has shades of Tracy Morgan). Even when he’s dancing around in his underwear to Stevie Wonder, there’s never a sense that Glover’s playing up his silliness just for the camera. In a weird way, it’s almost tragic, pivoting to the same kind of poignancy as a zillion “right to life” dramas in the span of a second. And as far as comedy writing goes, it’s hard to argue that there’s ever been a more finely-crafted sentence than “I need you and the kids to get in this orange: I’m going to go build a lamppost out of cinnamon buns” in American history. The ability to get utterly caught up in your character, even for a goofy internet video, is a great tool for comedian and it’s clearly served Glover well.

Yes, you do have to get past the poor production values, which sometimes make the dialogue hard to hear. It’s also a pretty limited sketch: all of the comedy comes from one character, and the hatter’s wife (I can’t find the actor’s name, though it appears to be Melanie) is a traditional “straight” role, who only really exists to drive the plot forward. Still, she does an excellent job playing it like a drama, especially in the final scene, which couldn’t have been easy given everything leading up to it.

I remember an interview with Glover in which he said that the first Derrick sketches that appeared on YouTube in the early days were met with confusion, as if people didn’t yet understand that the platform wasn’t just for home movies. Derrick was certainly one of the first groups to take advantage of this and bits like this are still around to show us why.

Now that I’ve covered all the Gabriel-era Genesis albums, all you prog-heads out there may wonder why I even bother to continue. It’s true that the band would never quite reach the same kind of gonzo creative apex it did in those works, and the edginess in The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in particular is singular. However, the history of Genesis has all sorts of interesting winding paths and dips, and we’re now entering one of the weirdest: the two albums after Peter Gabriel but before guitar virtuoso Steve Hackett left. While it must have been a chrysalis period at the time, in hindsight these two albums feel surprisingly even.

That’s not to say that the 1976 production A Trick of the Tail avoids feeling like a watered-down Nursery Cryme, but it’s more solid than you might expect. Out of all the different ways forward the band considered (and they considered many, including becoming a strictly instrumental outfit with no lead singer) this was probably the best to go. It feels more natural than you might think, even though it’s a step backwards in some ways. Instead of an attempt at a sprawling concept album, the band decided on a twee Edwardian short story collection approach, lighter and snugglier than their previous works but with some moments of menace. The album cover sums this up perfectly, with a bunch of kooky monsters, crooks and eccentrics waiting in line for their turn in a tableaux that makes me think of those old-timey Hendrick’s Gin ads.

Crack open the spine and let’s turn the page on this musty anthology. One thing I’ll say, you better start doing it right.

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Boo! Got something special for youse guys, just in time for Octoooooober:

We all love a good scare this time of year, and there’s nothing scarier than a vaguely European cautionary tale about human darkness. Years ago, I had the honor of getting a short story, “A Devil Among Men,” published in chapbook form through the now-defunct Deathless Press. The goal was to write a dark fairy tale, in most cases a re-imagining of an old one, but in mine an original story featuring familiar names, motifs and concepts.

Did you know that demons tell ghost stories too? They do, and this mordant reverse tale of a foolish devil will make an excellent treat this Halloween (or, if I don’t get this working until later, a wonderfully random stocking stuffer).

As luck would have it, I still have a limited amount of copies of these absolutely gorgeous things available, and after years of lugging them around I have finally set up a PayPal Account so you can own one! I’m asking $6 for each book and will be matching half of whatever I make off with a donation to the Cambridge Women’s Center. I’m excited to finally send these little monsters into the wild. Even if you hate the story, you will look very sophisticated with one of these chapbooks in your house and you can even hold them up to your ear and turn the pages slowly to get that nice flippity sound. Hot dang!

I will update this post once the link is ready, but I just wanted to get everyone pumped.  Keep your eyes peeled!

UPDATE: It’s here! Click the link below and send me $6 and I will send you a copy of this chapbook in exchange.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=QM2X8FBBCU57Q

Warning: The following has spoilers for literally every episode of Black Mirror produced to date. It’s kind of in the title, but still: you have been warned.

Black Mirror’s runaway success with U.S. and other international viewers should say something about where we’re all at these days. Rarely has a show this consistently depressing also felt like such a must-watch, creating a weird dissonance after each episode ends: something like “Wow, I feel extremely bleak about life! Time to binge the next one!” Despite series creator Charlie Brooker’s love of perverse humor and insistence that the show comes from comedic premises played straight, the anthology show has always reveled in its grimness, in various shades of despair, horror and cynicism that only a show birthed in rising tensions of the early 21st century can. Whee!

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Black Mirror began as a British sci-fi drama show with fewer than 10 episodes but has galloped into the international consciousness thanks to Netflix. The third season helped it past that  double digit mark but even with four total there’s still a tidy enough crop that we can easily arrange all of the twist (and non-twist) endings, for now, based on how much you just wanted to stare at a blank wall for a while afterwards.  Now that “Bandersnatch” is the water cooler discussion show of choice (for those who still work at places with water coolers), let’s take a close look at all the many different shades of sadness you can find in this gloriously morose anthology. And just a note: this is not a ranking based on quality, so don’t let my high placement of a certain infamous clunker worry you.

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A slipper, man.

The second half of The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway shows Genesis (and really just Peter Gabriel) reaching a breaking point. Up to this point, the album has been scattershot but with enough high points that it generally feels well-constructed and engaging. Unfortunately, the scope of this project was too wide and it shows here, with more sequences of noodling, more random lyrics and arguably the absolute nadir of the entire Gabriel era (which we’ll come to presently).

But revisiting Lamb for this project has left me with the feeling that it is, at the very least, an effort. Unlike Yes and Pink Floyd, whose lesser albums were just as overly long and self serious, Genesis remains mercurial here, and there’s something interesting about that. You really do have no idea where the story is going to go, or what weird vocal effect Gabriel is going to use, or whether the entire track will suddenly switch to a completely different style. Songs that I remembered being tedious turned out to be quite layered once given a second look. I don’t know if I can really say if Lamb “rewards repeat listening” but it was a great, big epic swing that deserves some appreciation, even if it falls flat.

Anyway (nevermind, that’s track four), let’s finish this up.

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Any band that lasts long enough eventually makes one: the Difficult Album. Whether it’s overly long, pretentious, too ambitious, marked with creative difficulties or all of the above, there’s always that one album in a band’s catalogue that exposes the tensions surging under the surface. For me, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway belongs in the same realm as The Wall, Quadrophenia, The White Album, Tales From Topographic Oceans and any other grand, complex work that creaks and groans under its own weight. There’s no doubting that some of the songs here represent the apex of the Peter Gabriel era, but it’s also, in true Difficult Album fashion, a sign of the need for change. The fact that Gabriel reportedly recorded his tracks separately from the band, White Album style, should also tell you something.

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