Sam Richardson on Veep/Image via HBO
I miss Detroiters. And Veep.
Not only because these were these two shows with acid humor and occasional heart. But more importantly, where do I get my Sam Richardson fix now? His appearances on I Think You Should Leave (Netflix) are NOT ENOUGH!
But it’s OK. Because I got my black comedy life this summer from two delightful shows that came on about the same time: A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO) and Sherman’s Showcase (IFC).
These shows occupy a space in black comedy that can run dry and silly. That plays as heavily on comic acting and wordplay as it does on jokes, gags and information.
Oh, the information. You’re gonna need it.
How else can I explain to the uninitiated why the Mary J. Blige performance sketch on Sherman’s Showcase was so funny because Black Twitter has joked for ages about how Mary can’t dance? Look up the YouTube compilations yourself. Shit goes back decades now. Decades!
How do I put into words the eminent frustration of patronizing soul food restaurants whose lack of resources play out as the most arcane set of quirks that no business should survive?
Or how black America’s love of Patti LaBelle runs so deeply that even her divorce anthem “On My Own,” with yacht-rock god Michael McDonald, can be spun into a piece on A Black Lady Sketch Show that becomes a comedy version of It Follows? Robin Thede, Quinta Brunson, Ashley Nicole Black and Gabrielle Dennis truly put their foot in it.
While the “Beat Be Gone” sketch on Sherman’s Showcase is funny in of itself, it’s even funnier if you’re acquainted with the longstanding black practice of stankface. The tagline, “Because you don’t always want to look like you’re enjoying yourself!” calls to a key rule in the black experience, too. This is a world in which black people being loud may draw police complaints, and the #BlackBoyJoy hashtag sprang up to showcase the humanity of black boys having some fun in order to break with toxically masculine ideas of hardness.
Sherman’s Showcase, masterminded by Diallo “I wrote ‘Slow Jam the News with Barack Obama’ on The Tonight Show” Riddle, took Lonely Island-style music comedy parody, and filtered it through Black Twitter. Then he turned it into a TV comedy show with an informercial selling a boxed set of a Soul Train knockoff.
The “Day In, Day Out” sketch answers the premise of what if Morris Day had Will Smith’s part in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Before you know it, the sketch jumps higher into parodying the very special episode in which Will’s father skips out on him yet again.
“Lady Rap Battle” is another great example of the show mixing high concept with low-comedy hijinx. Sherman is totally down to see Lil’ Tracy rap against G-Nah because there’s “nothing more exciting than watching a couple of lady MCs go at each other’s throats,” and even got T-shirts printed!
The sketch rightly calls out the frequent push to pit female rappers against each other, even when there are so few breaking through in the mainstream. But instead of continuing the Twitter beef to IRL like Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, the rap battle quickly turns into a rap armistice about sisterhood, sexual consent and declining to wear leather. But the sketch would be remiss without Sherman being hit with a shoe. Brilliant!
I enjoy how unabashedly specific these shows are.
A Black Lady Sketch Show paints its sketches with lived-in details that make things pop just that much more. “Bad Bitch Support Group” tackles the beauty regimens of a reigning Instagram model aesthetic with straight- (and beat-) faced intensity – waist trainers, 3-inch platform house shoes and all. However, for all the fantastic lines, such as “Is a partner who doesn’t appreciate the cheek work, deserving of the cheek twerk?”, the clicking of each woman’s acrylic nails (sorry, ahem, claws) as they gesture took it to extra brilliant.
Sherman’s Showcase so often reaches back into a time when pop culture was much, much more segregated. Such is the case with the “Now That’s What I Call White Music,” which mines the longstanding practice of black people getting down to pop and rock songs by white artists that crossed over to R&B radio. Not only might black listeners have never heard of said artist back in the day; they might not have known said artist was white.
My father used to tell the story about how shocked he and his friends were when they found out the Righteous Brothers were white. Famed Philadelphia black radio personality Georgie Woods said on air about the duo, “They white, y’all!”
Documentaries about Queen often mention how “Another One Bites the Dust” got picked up by black radio stations playing R&B and disco, and listeners thought the band was black. The “Now That’s What I Call White Music” sketch lists “Another One Bites the Dust” as the first track on the compilation of FUBT (for us, by them, pronounced “foo-butt”) music.
Furthermore, Twitter continues to go through waves of black people realizing that Bobby Caldwell, the man behind “What You Won’t Do For Love,” is white. Sherman even says, “Give y’all a minute to let that sink in,” as audience members react in astonishment and confusion.
If you were going to spoof Soul Train, you just had to joke about those Afro-Sheen ads in which Frederick Douglass appeared to young people. But Sherman’s Showcase goes so much deeper. Parts of this Douglass – the womanizing, the vain pettiness – line up with actual personal accounts of Douglass alongside his overall importance to society and history.
A Black Lady Sketch Show and Sherman’s Showcase do a great job of finding comedy within the kinship of blackness.
For Sherman’s Showcase, the concept of a black TV show that spans all black music from Motown onward creates its own remember-that time loops within the show. It’s as if they raided every episode of TV One’s Unsung, calling back to artists who never crossed over much to white audiences. (They still have an entire episode with a Prince-like musician, so they were only going to go so obscure at times.)
A Black Lady Sketch Show builds itself out of kinship, from the show’s own framing device. In a recurring sketch telling one ongoing story, the cast members, as themselves, hole up in a house after the apocalypse has happened. Cue that Living Single theme: “At the ending of the world, I’m glad I got my girls!”
Perhaps the show’s best sketch about the kinship of blackness, especially as a minority in a white-dominated world, is “Courtroom Kiki.” In this civil court evidentiary hearing, highlighted with the playing of “The Big One” by Alan Stanley Tew (aka the People’s Court theme song), things quickly become uncommon. The plaintiff, defendant, attorneys, stenographer, bailiff and judge are all black women.
Do you know how many times, as a black person, I have walked into a room, seen other black people, and been like, “Yooooo!”
The escalation of responses – from “Black girl magic for real?” to “What in the baby hair?” and full-on dancing – and flip-flopping from serious court talk to I-see-you comments create a comic rhythm further amplified by the camerawork and editing.
Furthermore, each show is unafraid to go dark, strange, or nerdy, either. The unpredictability, the way many of the shows’ sketches start in one place and wind up somewhere totally (and tonally) different? Bring me more of it.
A Black Lady Sketch Show goes to horror in another sketch – with murders, dismemberments and riverside disposals – before it’s revealed to be a campaign ad. Sherman’s Showcase wraps up its first season with a callback to several of its sketches before it turns into a Flashpoint-style time loops and a battle to restore the show’s proper timeline.
Tell me that doesn’t fit in with Sam Richardson wearing bone soldier-crushing exosuit and calling on Ebenezer Scrooge to help save the world from a post-apocalyptic future in I Think You Should Leave.
