SketchFest NYC kicked off its third year last night in the city-by-the-everything, and SF Seattle was fortunate enough to have their very own Josh Knisely there in the trenches. He sends us this report.
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New York in June is hot, sticky, and the air has the opacity of net curtains. As uncomfortable as this may be, there’s something rewarding about seeing ten comedy acts braving the sweaty, crowded backstage with nothing more than a warm bottle of water to keep them hydrated. This is not the air-cooled atmosphere of a Broadway show, no sir.
7:00 – A Week of Kindness
We started off with this local group manned by three awkward comedy nerds. As strange as these guys appeared, what really sold their performance was the force of their personalities. If the content of a sketch wasn’t perhaps its strongest, the energy and weirdness the actors brought to the stage more than made up for it.
7:30 – Drop Six
These guys knew how to find their light, stage eye-catching tableaus and delivered lines confidently and audibly – a real actor’s group. Save for a few choice moments, though, laughter rarely rose above a chuckle. But that’s okay! This group delivered a high-minded performance with wit and subtlety.
8:00 – The Farce Side
The Farce Side is a legacy group from Arizona State University founded in 1985. The writers and performers of this nine-person ensemble are all college aged, and unfortunately their inexperience showed in their performance. We saw several amusing takes on sketch standards such as college parties, a wacky doctor delivering a baby, a dying king and two guys in a tub pretending not to be gay – almost all of which concluded with that earmark of young writers: the straight-man exploding in frustration at the wacky situation. As if put off by the lack of reaction they were perhaps used to from their hometown college crowd, the group left the stage suddenly and quietly without a bow.
9:00 – All American Push-Up Party
After Seattle’s own Dusty Warren took the stage for his curtain call, one of the guys sitting in the row in front of me turned to his friend and said “Oh my fucking gawd!” What more really needs to be said? Dusty rarely disappoints, and it was fun to see a pair of new pieces make it into his ever-evolving one-man show.
9:30 – Party Central USA
The Party-Pack, they called it. Which, I guess, means two groups in an hour with”party” in their name. Party Central USA is a thirty-something group which performed competent, well-executed sketch of a more traditional flavor – deconstructionist date sketches involving characters speaking only in their subtext, a Spanish-class assignment gone grotesquely awry, and one particularly interesting scene where the audience becomes part of the scene by reading off cue cards in unison.
10:00 – Kurt & Kristen
This funny and charming duo was perhaps the darling group of the evening. Their show was almost entirely framed as a vaudevillian conversation with the audience, transitioning only occasionally to scenes or video pieces (one of which featured a theme song by former Seattle fixture Reggie Watts). Quirky and weird without ever losing their instant likability, these NYC comedy regulars had the audience on their feet. I loved the video featuring Kristen’s appearance on Law and Order: SVU with Kurt edited into it. I think I saw that episode.
11:00 – Two Girls for Five Bucks
This two-woman show built around barbed scenes of bitter female sexuality – drunken bachelorette parties with air-headed “HR gals,” lonely WWII war brides suppressing their lesbian urges, the phone messages of an obsessed woman after break-up, and, of course, a strip-tease finale.
11:30 – TYBRUS
Thursday night’s line-up seemed to have a running theme: comedians trying to convince the audience that they’re not gay. The least convincing argument came from two-man group TYBRUS, who spent almost the entire set in lifeguard speedos groping one another, and at least the last two minutes completely naked. The best evidence that they’re ACTUALLY straight came from their boyish obsession with scatological and other gross-out humor. If that’s your scene, baby, TYBRUS might be the group for you.
12:00 – The Harvard Sailing Team
Perhaps the most ruckus audience response on Thursday was for the NYU Tisch Shool Alumnus troupe The Harvard Sailing Team. This group understood that old maxim that brevity is the soul of wit. Longer sketches were peppered liberally with shorter, one-note pieces, sometimes only lasting a few seconds. It kept the momentum for scenes that took their time setting up their premises (a pair of scenes which were entirely unremarkable, save that the standard greeting was neither hug nor handshake, but a flamboyant dance move was perhaps the best use of a running gag of the evening).
On to night #2 …
