THE
BEST OF THE BEST SKETCH FEST 2005
ROLLICKING SKETCH-COMEDY FEST OFFERS FINE ARRAY OF HIGH
JINKS
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
Grant Butler - Editor Of The A&E
Sketch comedy can be perilous stuff. As anyone who's
ever watched "Saturday Night Live" can attest, a great
sketch can be a brilliant cocktail of political satire,
social commentary and physical sight gags. But bad
sketches, like those quarantined in the last half-hour of
"SNL," can be positively painful to watch.
Last weekend's third Best of the Best Sketch Fest was no
pain, all gain. The two-day event at Artists Repertory
Theatre featured 11 troupes from throughout the nation, and
there wasn't a clunker in the bunch, with the acts
showcasing the wide range of what sketch comedy can be.
Ten West, a duo out of Los Angeles, proved that sketch
comedy can be old-fashioned, wholesome and thoroughly
likable. Their vaudeville-style act capitalized on the
extreme physical differences between teeny-tiny Jon
Monastero and colossally tall Stephen Simon, opening with a
series of wordless slapstick routines. But they went beyond
circus antics with a hilarious bit about a boss and a
secretary with a well-refined love/hate relationship. Simon
offered the festival's most tender moment with a
bittersweet pantomime of a drunk fellow lamenting a lost
girlfriend.
The all-women group MEAT out of New York City couldn't have
been more different, shattering gender stereotypes with sly
takes on pop culture. One sketch pondered the Godot-like
inner thoughts of the ghosts in a Pac-Man game; another
featured a song and dance from twins straight out of
"Village of the Damned."
Sketch comedy can be goofy, too. New York's Elephant Larry
spoofed the culture of hip-hop and mass consumerism with
extreme energy and rubber-faced antics. San Francisco's
Kasper Hauser offered a twisted take on TV newscasts, with
inane live reports and dumb banter between anchors.
Seattle's Flaming Box of Stuff presented a series of
sketches that together amounted to a comic one-act play
about a group of factory workers in a soon-to-close Olympia
brewery. Laced with some surreal Pink Floyd hallucinations,
drugs, over-drinking and other ways people self-medicate
against shyness, heartbreak and uncertainty, this was
comedy with a poignant sense of soul.
Portland's own the 3rd Floor, which played host as the
organizer of the festival, got in the last word in the
Sketch Fest finale. Its act played as a sort of
mini-history of sketch comedy, beginning with immigrant
melodramas and musical hall hot-cha humor, all the way up
to today's styles. Standout moments included a spoof of
Abbott and Costello monster movies, and a twisted sendup on
1970s variety shows, a la the Osmonds.
If there's a downside to a festival this good, it's the
can't-miss nature of the schedule. Each act is so strong,
that you kick yourself if you don't catch it all. So you
hunker down for a grueling schedule: One night featured
five acts, and another featured six; with set changes,
that's 11 1/2 hours of live theater. That's a lot of time
to commit, but when you're dealing with the Best of the
Best, missing a single laugh would feel like a crime.