A friend who enjoys sketch comedy about as much as most people enjoy pumping gas recently went to the Second City for the first time. What got him through the evening, he says, was trying to figure out which Saturday Night Live slots the performers pictured themselves auditioning for.
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That’s no slight to the performers—after all, they wrote the material. And while a handful of their sketches strain to make jokes not worth making in the first place—like one about how Jay-Z often rhymes a word with itself, for example—the great majority of the evening’s two dozen scenes are pointed, clever, and even revelatory.
The ensemble members execute their myriad roles with ingenious subtlety, giving the most outlandish conceits—coffeehouse open-mike singer reveals he’s a suicide bomber, Russian peasant belts out a twisted folk song in a bizarre attempt to prevent a banker from foreclosing on her house—humanity. Even more impressive, these scrupulous, genial artists rarely draw attention to themselves. If they share a common objective, it seems, it’s to make everyone else onstage funnier.
