![]() ![]() More modest, but with plenty of sideways charm, is “Sherman’s Showcase,” from “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” writers Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin. All are exceptionally well realized - Dime Davis directs throughout - and winningly played. Other sketches include “Invisible Spy,” with Black as a woman so ordinary looking no one can remember her the “Pose” parody “Basic Ball,” with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner Caldwell Tidicue in the Billy Porter role (“The category is: clinical depression … make your way to the floor, if you can” ) and “Church Open Mic,” in which a call for testimony brings up congregants with their own agendas (stand-up comedy, market research, Instagram page promotion). A bit in which friends drink wine, gossip and play party games is revealed (small spoiler, sorry) to be taking place after the end of the world. The camera will pull back at the end of a sketch, turning a “Bad Bitch Support Group” into a drug trial, or an orgy of drug-addled violence into a politician’s campaign ad. A groom (Thede) can say anything but “I do” language itself breaks down. For an actor, sketch comedy is a chance to demonstrate both personality and range: an opportunity to play many parts in a short time, where a sitcom star may spend years playing just one.Īll sorts of ideas, big and little, spin about in “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” but there is a tendency for ordinary things to quickly become extraordinary. She’s joined here, in an exceedingly nimble main cast, by Quinta Brunson, Gabrielle Dennis (“The Game”) and Ashley Nicole Black (“Full Frontal with Samantha Bee”). “Black Lady” was created by and stars Robin Thede, who was the head writer on Larry Wilmore’s “The Nightly Show” - Wilmore is among the famous faces, including Angela Bassett, David Alan Grier, Loretta Devine, Laverne Cox and Khandi Alexander, to guest on Thede’s show - and had her own current-events comedy, “The Rundown With Robin Thede,” on BET. (IFC is also home to “Baroness von Sketch Show,” a white Canadian lady sketch show, which returns in October.) There is a small but mighty tradition of black sketch comedy on television - “Key & Peele,” “Chapelle’s Show,” “In Living Color” and, going back, “The Flip Wilson Show” - among which these new series sit well. Comedy Central has lately premiered “Alternatino with Arturo Castro,” which brings a Latinx sensibility to the form two series with African American creators and casts, HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” and IFC’s “Sherman’s Showcase,” debut this week. With all that in its favor, sketch comedy can still seem a secondary form, but its lineage is venerable, and the line is far from played out. (Online humor is very much a thing of shreds and sketches.) The best have a puckish joyousness, even when the material is dark. Maintaining their integrity out of context, individual sketches are easily plugged into online video platforms and social media regurgitation machines. Sketch shows play with style they are fast and fleet, highly maneuverable and modular. It’s perfect for parody, satire, social commentary or examining the small quirks of human nature. Freed from the demands of narrative and character development, sketch comedy tends to be more intellectual than emotional perhaps it’s more accurate to say that even its emotions are rooted in ideas. It can be abstract, absurd, or shot through with topical urgency, expressing from series to series or sketch to sketch an individual vision or group dynamic. Often beginning with the question “What if?” sketch comedy is all about possibility. Nothing on television in recent years has been more ambitious or radical than HBO’s “Random Acts of Flyness,” a sort of Afrocentric art-variety show by way of Jean-Luc Godard from the Brooklyn-based filmmaker Terence Nance or Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s Adult Swim series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” before it or Ernie Kovacs’ surrealist blackouts way before that. Yet this perceived lack of importance makes them an excellent vehicle for distinctive, even oddball points of view. Compared to the dramas and sitcoms that dominate the conversation in this Triple-Platinum Age of television, they can seem ephemeral, the well-fortified institution of “Saturday Night Live” notwithstanding - a fancy version of something amateurs put on in coffeehouses and YouTubers post with a smartphone and half an idea. Sketch shows are the stealth bombers of television.
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