Sundays With a Stranger: Weird Seattle Is Alive at SketchFest Seattle

View this email in your browser Weird Seattle Is Alive at SketchFest Seattle Preparing for Seattle Sketch Comedy's Biggest Week with the Maple Daddies NATHALIE GRAHAM A Dad keeping it weird. Billie Winter for The Stranger In a Wedgwood House decorated almost exclusively with frogs, six Maple Daddies sit around a table. "I have acquired the four bags of lizards," Darrin Schultz says. "I didn't make it to Spirit Halloween," Courtney Heuer says. She needed pitchforks and a tiny hat. She'll try again tomorrow. She did have at least one success, though. She reported she had started the homunculus costume. According to 16th-century alchemy, a homunculus is a miniature person. Heuer's homunculus so far was two sweatshirts sewn together with two face holes. She still needed to sew pants together, but then it would be done. Which was a good thing because there was so little time until the show. The 26th annual SketchFest Seattle, the longest-running sketch comedy festival in North America, was the following weekend. The Maple Daddies only had this night to rehearse ahead of the show. (Since the Seattle sketch comedy scene is small, many of them are also running the festival.) One of the longtime Dads, Sophie Schwartz, who loves bones and goths and must be the one responsible for all the weird creature sketches the Dads do, drove all the way up from Portland to run through everything. Rehearsal via Zoom works well enough when there's no big show coming. But the show was coming, and Schwartz needed to rehearse her song about a deadbeat demon dad in person for the first time. She said she would probably turn around and drive back after rehearsal. She only moved from Seattle recently, but didn't want to stop performing. The scene here is one of the only art forms in Seattle that's "entirely ground up," Cassia Ward, another Maple Dad, says. The three to four active sketch groups in the area began as a group of friends. "We do it through our own will," Ward says. "We're not really beholden to any money or anything. None of us get paid. We often pay to do this." "Yeah, I did buy four bags of lizards for this," Schultz says. Billie Winter for The Stranger The sketch comedy scene these days is a far cry from the 1990s when Seattle sketch show Almost Live! aired, becoming the rising sketch comedy tide to lift all the sketch comedy boats. Since then, Seattle sketch has ebbed and flowed. It's still in a post-COVID lull, but local groups remain optimistic it will continue to grow. SketchFest is a big part of that. For the rubes, sketch comedy is pretty much Saturday Night Live. Or, for those slightly more with it, it's like Netflix's I Think You Should Leave or Comedy Central's Key & Peele. A sketch performance usually features back-to-back (hopefully funny) vignettes.  "I like to think of it as micro theater with a comedy slant," Ward says. From September 11 through September 14, the Unexpected Productions theater in Pike Place is hosting a sketch comedy bonanza. Groups from Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles are flying in—on their own dime, Ward emphasized. Solo acts including one performer all the way from Toronto, Canada, will perform. Only a few years ago, the scene used to have way more groups, according to Nick Kruger, another Maple Dad who moved to Seattle in the mid-aughts. Much of it had to do with a space in Greenwood that used to be a karate dojo. "I called the Pocket our comedy church," Kruger says. From 2014 to 2019, the Pocket Theater became sketch comedy's home in Seattle. A local comedian, Clayton Weller, started the theater after working as SketchFest's artistic director. While organizing the fest, Weller realized there was no real local scene. He wanted to boost the local talent in the festival—it wasn't enough to see sketch from elsewhere, he wanted to see Seattle represented. Weller began renting out venues and hosting sketch comedy months. He spent his own money and saw actual returns. He realized he might be able to do this for a living. Weller started a Kickstarter campaign. It reached its $8,000 goal in 8.5 hours. "The Pocket showed that there was a demand for a place to do weird new works," Weller says. There was no performance fee, no rental fee. Weller helped nurture those works. Billie Winter for The Stranger The Pocket birthed many local sketch groups, including the Maple Daddies, through something called Sketch Summit, Kruger says. Sketch Summit was an incubator. Anyone interested in doing sketch comedy put their name into a hat. Then, the Pocket staff created randomized sketch teams and paired them with a mentor. Over a month or two, the teams wrote and edited scripts together and put together a sketch showcase. Weller said the SketchFest organizers would scout out the Pocket for talent to put in the festival. He had created a blossoming local scene. But then the reality of Seattle in the late 2010s struck. Comedy wasn't paying the bills, and the rent kept rising. In December of 2019, the Pocket closed. "We say the Pocket died of natural causes," Kruger says. The scene hasn't been the same since. It's still small and the talented people end up leaving for bigger things. "The reality of the Seattle comedy scene is it's a slow drip of the talented people to LA, New York, and Chicago," Kruger says. There's a ceiling here because Seattle doesn't really have an entertainment industry. Once local talent starts succeeding, there's nowhere for them to go. What has stuck around, however, is delightfully weird and very Seattle. Because the performances aren't tied to anyone's livelihood or career aspirations, there's a freedom to be… strange. That's what you'll see in the local showcase, Kruger says. "You're gonna see some fun, interesting, weird stuff that is not trying to cater to the entire country," Kruger says. "It's more free, more avant-garde, and it's people doing it for the love of it rather than a means to an end." Billie Winter for The Stranger That's why his group can do sketches about a Family Feud game where all the survey answers come from 100 lizards. Or how, in a past SketchFest, Kruger spent hours using parts from two bikes to build a prop for one sketch. It was a medieval blowjob machine. For now, the scene remains small, but Kruger is optimistic it will grow. A member from a different local sketch group, Good Crash, is dead-set on starting another public access comedy show akin to Almost Live! Kruger says they'd been in talks with Cascade PBS to possibly make that happen, but the effort is currently dead in the water. What Seattle sketch really needs is a home like the Pocket. Kruger believes the path to having a Pocket 2.0 is to partner with one of Seattle's multiple improv theaters. In the last few years, improv has exploded in the city, filling the sketch vacuum the Pocket left behind with more "Yes, And" than anyone really wants (I do improv comedy locally so I can say this). If sketch and improv can live together once again in Seattle, the scene could really grow, Kruger says. "Seattle has a unique voice in sketch comedy, and I think it's worth supporting and cherishing." One of the ways to really do that? Go to SketchFest. You may get some lizards thrown at you. 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