Of all the theatrical genres, comedy is probably the simplest. It’s also one of the most challenging. Laughter is the easiest reaction to try to attain in an audience. You know right away whether or not you’re successful. At the same time, silence can be ominous and really painful to have to sit through onstage as an actor. Improv can be really responsive to the silence and often involves comics frantically looking for the quickest route between two laughs. Standard sketch comedy isn’t quite as responsive on the fly as improv. Depending on the group, sketches can change and evolve to fit an audiences responses.
Patrick Schmitz’s Sketch 22 lies somewhere in between improv and standard sketch. The premise is this: a group of writers get together to work on a series of sketches. The sketches are then joined by actors and directors who perform the finished project exactly 22 hours after the project began. It’s a bit like other funny-under-fire projects. It’s like Bunny Gumbo’s Combat Theatre without quite as many of the UW-Whitewater alumni or Insurgent/Alamo Basement’s Berzerk!!! without quite as much of the weird.
The latest installment of Sketch 22 comes to Milwaukee comes to the Alchemist Theatre Saturday, January 9th at 8pm.
