THE
BEST OF THE BEST SKETCH FEST 2003
SEX-ED
AND SHOP CLASS? MUST BE COMEDY SKETCH FEST
Tuesday, July 29th, 2003
Holly Johnson - Special To The Oregonian
How do you make someone laugh? It's a mysterious and
elusive business, but basically if you hold up a mirror to
the human condition and skew it, it's a start. "The Best of
the Best Sketch Fest," the national sketch comedy festival
hosted Friday and Saturday by Portland's 3rd Floor comedy
group at Artists Repertory Theatre, exploded on the local
scene, leaving streaks of brilliance in its wake. Proving
the myriad ways to tickle the funny bone, ensembles from
Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago shared the
spotlight with local talent.
Sketch comedy, performed primarily by young adults, is the
stuff of "Saturday Night Live." It's not a distant cousin
to live theater, but rather lies at theater's core.
Sketches born from the short attention span that television
has spawned echo short stories, while plays are like
novels. Some sketches are quick sight gags, others ramble
with loose narrative. Local TV newscasters, therapy
sessions, relationship angst, horror movies and even
birdwatchers ("ornithusiasts") were some of the subjects
spoofed with relish at the festival, produced by 3rd Floor
actors Andy Buzan and Ted Douglass.
Hosted by Daria O'Neill, a radio personality at KNRK, the
marathon featured exciting writing and acting talent from
35-member 3rd Floor (in its seventh year) and Hoskins &
Breen (Loren Hoskins and John Breen), both acclaimed groups
on the national sketch comedy circuit and recent hits at
the Chicago Sketch Fest. The strongest out-of-town talent
came from L.A.-based Troop!, whose Monty Pythonesque
surrealism included a sketch of candy flavors discussing
their careers: Lemon's found a new frontier in cleaning
products, and he's taking Lime along.
Other delicious samples from the comedy smorgasbord: In a
skit from San Francisco's Kasper Hauser, a befuddled high
school teacher, strapped by budget cuts, offers a combined
mechanical woodshop and sex-education class. Inhabitants of
a senior nursing home sketched by actors from Bald Faced
Lie of Seattle move at an ineffectual snail's pace, risking
fragile bodies to wrest the remote control from the TV
bully hooked on Lawrence Welk. Hoskins & Breen offered
one sketch of two FBI agents arresting each other
simultaneously, and a pair of spaced-out British car
mechanics whose useless inventions include a tiny
television for inside your mouth.
In a rhythmic tour-de-force sketch, Buzan in a toga recited
Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech from
"Julius Caesar," while in a second pool of light Hoskins
portrayed a modern-day mafioso mourning the death of a don,
paraphrasing line for line the Shakespeare in contemporary
mobster speech. When the two meet and embrace across time,
it's a perfect ending.
Here's hoping next year's sketch fest is peopled with more
sparkling talent and gets a larger venue. It may well need
it if the word gets out. This kind of theater teetering on
the edge of convention proves what we've always known about
stagecraft: Dying is easy, it's comedy that's hard.