A mob of drunken comedy fans was out with their friends for a night of inexpensive laughter. Crowds pushed towards the doors en masse for each show, creating exciting buildup for the acts to come. And that was just the lobby. Inside, the crowd dynamic was enthusiastic and consistent with the level of alcohol consumption taking place in the lobby. You could rely on that tipsy-looking audience member’s laughter lasting just a few seconds too long, every time.
What’s so funny, you ask? The city of Chicago is home to some of the best sketch comedy in the United States, but there’s a lot more to the second city’s comedy than just The Second City. Case in point: Chicago’s annual SketchFest, a ten-day showcase of sketch groups from around the nation, attracted over 100 troupes. Held at the Theater Building of Chicago in Belmont, the event is the largest of its kind in the world, though Guy Wicke, a staff member, noted that the crowd was tamer than in years past. “This is my first year, but I’ve heard horror stories,” he said of the group the festival normally attracts.
This year, some Northwestern alums crashed the party as one of the featured acts, Ruby Lake. Ruby Lake offered one long-form sketch based around an imagined Spanish soap opera. The sketch begins when fictional Mexican soap opera star Monolo Mantoya is flown in to join the cast and boost ratings. The main gag (aside from obvious soap opera melodrama) becomes immediately apparent: Monolo Montoya has only one arm. Montoya’s other arm is played by his assistant Perito, a stocky little man in a bowling shirt, who stands behind Montoya and performs the duties of his left arm.
The sketch more than made up for what it lacked in originality of premise with bizarre and clever plot points. Highlights of the show included a scene where the male lead of the show, ousted by Montoya, gets taken prisoner at an amputee’s bar and is battled over in an amputee showdown. Ruby Lake required a little more patience than some of the more fast-paced sketch acts, but in the end the group created a memorable and unique experience through great acting and an abundance of what-the-eff moments.
In addition to Ruby Lake, Pangea 3000, a troupe hailing from New York, stood out at the festival. Pangea 3000 is a sketch group consisting of writers from the popular fake news publication, The Onion. The group managed to stay in line with the reputation of the paper with a performance that was quick-witted, clever, sometimes childish and always pop culture-savvy. Pangea opened, for example, with a live-action reproduction of two gamers going through a character-select screen, bouncing in place and repeating meaningless battle cries a la Mortal Kombat.
The group catered well to an audience of short attention spans with a high density of jokes and fast movement through quick skits. Certain sketches were harder for most of the audience to understand, such as one in which a doctor sits and eats a chicken parmesan sandwich for a couple of minutes – a demonstration of the awkward pause that is so crucial to modern-day comedy. Most of the audience did not see any humor in the long and confusing sketch, which only earned scattered chuckles. For every abstract skit like this, though, was one full of wackiness, loud noises and partial nudity to keep the set balanced.
In spite of the childishness, Pangea still reached audiences of all ages. Northwestern Writing Professor Edie Skom, who was in attendence with her husband, beamed throughout the show. “I really enjoyed it,” she said.
SketchFest does a great job of bringing some of the nation’s best comedy to Chicago and reminding the public what this city is all about. The festival is held annually in January and at $12.50 a ticket, students would be remiss to not fill the seats next year at one of the most reliably entertaining group events in town.