THE
BEST OF THE BEST SKETCH FEST 2007
SUPPORTING OUR TROUPES ISN'T FOR THE SKITTISH
THE BEST OF THE BEST SKETCH FEST 2007
Friday, July 13th, 2007
Eric Bartels
There is some confusion
involving sketch comedy, and Ted Douglass thinks he knows
why.
“People think of sketch, they think of skits, like
campfire skits,” says Douglass, a founding member of
the Portland comedy troupe the 3rd Floor. “Skits are
when your high school football team puts on a wig and a
dress at an assembly.
“It’s a problem that every sketch group
has.”
What Douglass and 3rd Floor do isn’t stand-up or
improv; it’s the quirky, theater-based stuff you grew
up watching on television, whether it was Sid Caesar or
“Saturday Night Live.”
Even when people know what sketch comedy is, “they
just don’t expect to see it on stage,” he says.
“I can’t tell you how many times someone has
come up to me and said, ‘I had no idea something like
this existed in Portland.’ ”
This weekend, sketch comedy won’t just exist, it will
live large. The 3rd Floor hosts the fifth annual
“Best of the Best Sketch Fest,” bringing a
half-dozen of the country’s best troupes to town.
“Sketch can include so many styles,” Douglass
says. “This festival has it all over the
place.”
Several of the visiting companies, all of which are
familiar to 3rd Floor from its own travels on the sketch
circuit, make return visits to Portland.
“We have three criteria: You’re active on the
festival circuit, we saw you in person and we loved
you,” says Douglass, who produces local radio’s
“Daria and Mitch Show” (105.1 FM, the Buzz).
Hosts Daria O’Neill and Mitch Elliott are scheduled
to emcee the festival.
There are a number of Portland connections among the
visiting companies:
Chicago’s Dark Eyed Strangers feature former 3rd
Floor members Brandon Campbell and Tony St. Clair.
“The Weekly Armenian” is a one-man show created
in Los Angeles by Bryan Coffee, an original 3rd Floor
player.
And both Slow Children at Play (Boston) and the all-woman
outfit Meat (New York) include former Portland residents.
The 3rd Floor will reserve the festival’s Saturday
night closing slot for itself, and deservedly so.
The company’s shows, which consistently pack houses,
display a mastery of pop culture iconography and the
ability to mix notes of surprising sweetness with stuff as
appallingly childish – and hysterically funny –
as a man throwing open a garment to reveal he is naked but
with his privates hidden between his legs.
Douglass says the 11-year-old 3rd Floor had been on the
festival circuit for some time – it makes two or
three trips a year – when it made a crucial discovery
in 2003.
“The first year we went to Chicago, we met the people
who ran the festival. It was two or three people. We came
back and went, ‘We could do that.’ ”
By the next year, “Best of the Best” was up and
running.
“We weren’t sure if Sketch Fest Portland was
going to be a big draw,” Douglass says.
“Portland showed up in droves. It was a big
hit.”
This year, Douglass looks forward to working with returning
3rd Floor alumni like St. Clair and Coffee, and is excited
about a festival feature called Scramble Bramble.
At the close of Friday night, soloists, teams of comics
from different companies and even artists not on the
festival calendar show their stuff in a kind of comedic
open mike.
“The object was to push the boundaries,”
Douglass says. “I’ve seen really great stuff,
but then sometimes you see total crap. That’s the
point of it.”
Douglass says the mobility of the nation’s top sketch
troupes has served to scramble old expectations about
regional humor and push the comedy envelope for everyone.
“The first time we went to Seattle, we realized there
was this much bigger picture,” he says. “The
sketch circuit has made people better. We’ve created
this giant network.”
– Eric Bartels
8 p.m. FRIDAY and SATURDAY, July 13-14, Artists Repertory
Theatre Main Stage, 1516 S.W. Alder St., 503-627-9847,
www.the3rdfloor.com, $10 single show,
$32 four-show pass, $49 festival pass