A Black Lady Sketch Show (TV Program)

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    ‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’ Has the Most Exciting Comics (and the Silliest)

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    Robin Thede and her castmates bring a light, joyful touch and a comedy-nerd sensibility to this HBO series that often, delightfully, descends into the absurd.In this Friday’s episode of “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” Robin Thede, its charismatic showrunner and star, plays the world’s worst thief. She picks fights with conspirators during a heist, wears a glittery silver wig that isn’t exactly inconspicuous, and, before stealing a diamond, takes a selfie and posts it to social media.It’s a stylishly executed genre spoof, with a solid premise and slick split-screen editing. And yet, its polish merely supports what really makes you laugh: the flamboyant goofiness of Thede, who commits to preposterousness with deadly seriousness. Her physical comedy, kinetic and rubbery, constantly shifting and shameless, italicizes everything. When she maneuvers across the room like a member of the Ministry of Silly Walks, the whole expensive-looking production becomes part of the joke.The truth of sketch comedy is right there in the name. Quick and broad strokes are at the core of the fun, and that can’t be entirely manufactured in a writers’ room. Take it from no less an authority than Bob Odenkirk (“Mr. Show,” “Saturday Night Live”). In his new memoir, “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” he writes about his considerable experience brainstorming, acting and producing sketches, concluding that ultimately “performance matters more than writing and ideas, loony behavior trumps clever constructions.”“A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO has all these elements, but now in its third season, the balance has shifted and it’s grown into, above all else, a spectacular showcase for Thede, the most influential and exciting figure in sketch at the moment. She leads a strong cast, including stalwarts Ashley Nicole Black and Gabrielle Dennis as well as the more recent addition Skye Townsend. It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t that long ago that the title sequence of this show included as many Black women as could be found in the casts of four decades of “Saturday Night Live.”Townsend, left, and Dennis are part of the show’s strong cast.Tina Thorpe/HBOCreated in 2019, “A Black Lady Sketch Show” announced its point of view about representation in its title and also in who it hired, becoming the first sketch series with a cast and writing staff exclusively made up of Black female talent. But this only gets at a small piece of the show’s impact. Its first season, still its best, featured the writer Amber Ruffin before she started her talk show, and the cast member Quinta Brunson before she left to create the hit sitcom “Abbott Elementary.”What marks the sketches are formal pivots (in a common twist, a scene is often revealed to be an ad or documentary); a light, joyful touch; and a comedy-nerd sensibility deeply versed in the history of television. You see this not just in the obscure references to “A Different World” or the meticulousness of a “227” parody, with Thede as a deliriously spot-on version of Jackée Harry’s Sandra, but also in the nudge-nudge casting. (Garrett Morris! David Alan Grier!)The comedy here usually offers new spins on classic territory: sportscasters providing color commentary on mundane events, or spoofs of vampires, zombies and marginal figures from the time of Christ. In these familiar premises, Thede, whose parents named her after Robin Williams, foregrounds character and improvisations, allowing room to riff and improvise, never letting seconds go by without a joke. Tying the sketches together are scenes with the cast in a story line that involves an apocalypse you never truly believe is real. This show can veer toward darkness, but horror is a tool rather than the point. In my favorite sketch this season, Thede plays a Midwestern-nice woman with a “Fargo” accent whose affection for stitched inspirational quotes and cutesy mottos shifts from benign to twisted. It might change the way you look at small-town antique stores.Thede has talked about her love for the wildly popular if far too forgotten 1990s sketch show “In Living Color,” which featured a talent-rich, mostly Black cast and a constantly changing writers’ room often filled with white staff members. It was more topical, celebrity-obsessed and wavering in its comic voice than “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” But what both series share is a delight in oversize personalities like Hadassah Olayinka Ali-Youngman (Thede), a political radical whose overly enunciated delivery is a cousin to Damon Wayans’s Oswald Bates from “In Living Color.”“I will never be enslaved,” she says with conviction, before counting the ways. “Mentally, physically, spiritually, metaphysically, biologically, specifically, pacifically, Michael Ealy, Robert E. Lee, none of the Lees.”Ashley Nicole Black specializes in understated character types.Tina Thorpe/HBOPerhaps because of the lasting influence of Tim and Eric, the trend in sketch comedy has been for scenes to get absurd quickly. The second season of “Three Busy Debras,” which just began on Adult Swim, is one example. On “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” Thede builds her jokes with patience, taking time to establish the world of her character before spiraling into the surreal. On last week’s episode, Thede played a croaking spelling-bee host, a chirpy morning-show meteorologist and a peacocking art-school student. Each of these are tightly drawn and fully realized before descending into total nonsense. Sometimes it comes in an aside. (“Whoever can help me find my keys outside Domino’s will immediately be crowned the winner,” the spelling-bee host says.) What they share is an outsize confidence and clueless bravado that remains, against all odds, endearing.Even when she plays herself, Thede displays this quality. In an interstitial scene, she asks her castmates, wine glass in hand: “You know what I like about me?” After a self-important pause, she spoofs showbiz self-deprecation: “Even though I’m evolved, I’m not perfect, you know?”Her co-stars can match her comic energy, especially Dennis, whose cartoonish characters have a mischievous eccentricity. Black provides an appealing contrast, generally playing closer to earth, satirizing more subtle character types, like an understated spy and an overly positive friend praising you for sleeping on the job. As the show has matured, it’s become less interested in lampooning the world than in creating its own.One of its most biting sketches imagined a focus group where the wildly contradictory negative feedback about a show involved prescriptive demands. The artists returned with a new attempt that was a video of the critics. They still hated it. It’s a nice shot at the caution of showbiz today, one that comes with a hard-earned lesson: Sometimes, for a comic to find what works, you have to tune out the audience. More

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      Ashley Nicole Black Is Competing Against Herself for an Emmy

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      The comedian was nominated twice in the same Emmy category for her television writing. She’s just getting started.At first, Ashley Nicole Black didn’t get why people kept sending her the meme of Spider-Man pointing at an identical Spider-Man, an image often used to joke about situations in which two incredibly similar people face off.But when someone Photoshopped Ms. Black’s face onto both Spider-Mans, it clicked. The 2021 Emmy Awards nominations had just been announced, and Ms. Black, 36, had been nominated twice in the same category.She was competing against herself.Ms. Black was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series for “The Amber Ruffin Show” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” Two other people have been nominated twice in this category in the past five years: John Mulaney and Seth Meyers, both in 2019.I CANT WITH YALL 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/YE7gBnqjw0— Ashley Nicole Black (@ashleyn1cole) July 14, 2021
      “I feel like that kid still, who’s on the side of the playground, who nobody’s noticed,” Ms. Black said in a recent video interview. But that’s just impostor syndrome talking. Ms. Black has been nominated for an Emmy eight times: twice for writing for a variety special and six times for writing for a variety series. She also won once, in 2017, for her work on “Not the White House Correspondents Dinner” with Samantha Bee.Ms. Black has written for many critically acclaimed series and shows, including “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” “Ted Lasso” and “Bless This Mess.” Although “A Black Lady Sketch Show” is Ms. Black’s first time as a series regular, she was a correspondent on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” and acted in “Drunk History” and the 2014 film “An American Education.”Robin Thede, the creator of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO — which was also nominated this year as an Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, and twice for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (Yvette Nicole Brown and Issa Rae) — sees Ms. Black as “a force of nature and of comedy.”“I have been lucky enough to work with her as a writer and performer and know firsthand how ridiculously good she is at both,” Ms. Thede wrote in an email. “She’s truly a powerhouse who will leave an indelible mark on this industry.”Ms. Black described herself as “someone who’s observing what’s going on in the world, and trying to reflect it back to people.” “To me,” she said, “that’s art.”She is from a family of musicians, so singing in an ensemble, she said — whether it was musical theater or show choir — meant learning to breathe with others and sound like one voice. This set her up for the moment she found improv comedy, because she already knew how to collaborate — and how not to steal a scene. “I was, I think, picking up all the pieces I needed to get where I was going,” she said.After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2007, she began a Ph.D. program in performance studies at Northwestern University. She hated it and was anxious all the time, she said, so her parents bought her an improv class at the Second City comedy club in nearby Chicago to blow off steam.When she took a comedy writing class there, a teacher pulled her aside to let her know she was a writer.“People had been telling me, ‘You should try this. You should try this,’ and I had been uncomfortably trying it,” Ms. Black said. “But ‘you’re a writer’? I was like, ‘yes.’ I completely shifted my view of myself to be a writer first. And that was when everything started to fall into place.”Chicago, Ms. Black said, is the best place in the world to learn comedy writing. There’s an “emotionality” she found in Chicago that she values in many of her collaborators, including Ms. Bee and Ms. Ruffin.“What attracted me to Sam and Amber is that they’re admitting to you that they live in the world,” she said. “And they might be upset about it, and they might be angry about it, and they might cry about it on camera, because they’re not removed from it. They’re a part of it.”This is the “good stuff” of comedy, in Ms. Black’s eyes: The stuff that happens when characters have feelings, and when they’re flawed. People who have been to therapy and have their lives together aren’t nearly as fun to embody, she said. A good example of a character who embodies that tension: Ashley’s perfectionistic alter ego on “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”In the show, Ms. Black plays a woman (also named Ashley) who is a bossy know-it-all. She is trying for total control, and in the process, irritating her friends. “I am not like that and take great pains not to be,” Ms. Black said, “but it’s so much fun to play.”“All day, you have anxiety. You’re trying to make sure everyone around you is comfortable,” she said of real life. “You’re thinking about what you say and what you do and how it affects people. And then, when you get to play those characters who aren’t that way, it’s so freeing.”Ms. Black said she tends to be quiet and a little shy, and that she used to worry that not being “on” all the time might disappoint people. “But I’ve sort of released feeling bad about that,” she said, “because I just try to be present and have honest experiences.”During the pandemic, those experiences included spending time with her family in Los Angeles, being a hardworking dog mom to Gordi the Sato and watching every Marvel movie ever made. “I just wanted to watch good guys win some things,” she said.Right now she’s evaluating what she wants to do next and what percentage of her time she wants to spend on each thing. Ms. Ruffin wrote in an email about Ms. Black, “she’s gone from ‘a writer’ to ‘theeeee writer.’” But Ms. Black is still hoping for a 70-30 or 60-40 writing to acting split, she said.For now, “It really made me so happy that people — oh my gosh, I’m getting emotional — care what I’m doing,” she said. “So I’m just really grateful that anybody noticed that I was working so hard.” More