Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As any comic performer will attest, stand-up is a different animal than sketch comedy. So at Saturday night’s sold-out show at the Lakeshore Theatre it was impressive to watch Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter —two-thirds of the popular New York nightclub ensemble Stella, which leveraged its collective insanity into one ecstatically bizarre season on Comedy Central in 2005—reinvent themselves as stand-ups. The two started in this direction a couple years ago, and their routines have a different feel, more grounded in real life, than either their old cable show or their cameos in ThinkFilm’s The Ten, a darkly humorous anthology by Stella partner David Wain that opens in Chicago on August 3.
Last year Black made his feature writing and directing debut with The Pleasure of Your Company, a romantic comedy starring Jason Biggs (American Pie) and Isla Fisher (The Wedding Crashers), who’s engaged to Sacha Baron Cohen (now that would be a wedding to crash). The movie premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, an experience Black described as “fantastic. We had a great time. It’s a beautiful city, and [the film] was received well.” Bought by MGM, the movie was retitled Wedding Daze, scheduled to open in March 2007, pushed back to April, then delayed again until August. Two weeks ago the studio announced the movie’s status as TBD. “It means that they’re never going to release it, is what it means,” said Black, who learned a week ago that the film has been permanently shelved.
