The State’s skewed sketch comedy was panned by critics, but then a funny thing happened
When “The State” debuted on MTV in January 1994, there was no reason to believe the series would become a landmark in sketch comedy. “It’s so terrible it deserves to be studied,” said a New York Daily News review of the premiere. Entertainment Weekly called the show “significantly less than sporadically funny.”
Despite lacking in critical success, the show found a devoted audience that stuck with its namesake group well past its last episode in October 1995. In different combinations, its members went on to make, write, or appear in, among other shows and films, Comedy Central’s “Reno 911!,” the “Night at the Museum” movies, and the cult classic “Wet Hot American Summer.” The State has reunited in several forms throughout the years, but the current tour — which stops at Medford’s Chevalier Theatre on Oct. 19 — is their first extended jaunt as a group since the show ended in 1995. (Proceeds from the tour benefit the Entertainment Community Fund, which supports actors during the strike.)
Since its 1988 inception at New York University, The State’s specialty was always timeless ridiculousness, which members Thomas Lennon, Kerri Kenney-Silver, and Ken Marino, speaking on a group phone call, credit for the troupe’s surprising longevity. (Joining those three on the tour are David Wain, Joe Lo Truglio, Michael Jann, Kevin Allison, and Michael Ian Black.)
“We never did anything topical, really,” says Lennon. “We were never into impressions of people. We were into the absurd and things that had never been done before. Our pursuit of truly absurd things and absurd theater accidentally became our staying power.”
The group’s love for the absurd resulted in sketches featuring a musical called “Porcupine Racetrack” (replete with Broadway cliches like singing nuns and streetwise newsies), an impromptu father-son footrace that goes violently wrong, and a Charlie Rose-style interview with a scientist (played by Lennon) specializing in psychological monkey torture (“Sometimes I’ll pretend like I’m going to set them free — I’ll drive the car right up to the edge of the jungle and stop, and then I’ll turn the car right back around.”)
As the group’s members took their act beyond the NYU campus and into East Village clubs and theaters, they realized that they were not only funny and creative, they really liked working together. That camaraderie remains, says Kenney-Silver.
“I think there’s something about a committee of people that you respect,” she says. “I would intentionally force myself to rise to the occasion to impress and blend in, to raise to everybody else’s level. I felt like I was in a masterclass with these people. We kept each other in check. We were really honest with each other.”
They further bonded, says Marino, in response to that critical shellacking, as well as general lack of interest from the typical MTV viewer.
“I never thought we were accepted by the MTV world,” says Marino (”Party Down,” “The Other Two”). “I never registered in my head if anybody at all was watching or accepting us. But our first season got some negative reviews, it pulled us together and made us more hungry.”
That hunger resulted in sketches that were even more absurd than their forebears, as well as meta-commentary about the show’s lackluster reception. In one sketch featuring the group as themselves, Truglio read a vicious review out loud. In a commercial for the show’s second season, the group wandered around sadly to the tune of the Bee Gees’ “I Started a Joke,” while biting blurbs scrolled across the screen. The ad ended with the words “The State: more miserable crap.”
“That almost marks the real beginning of The State,” says Lennon. “Everybody said we sucked, but we felt like we were right. I think that’s when we came into our own.”
Not everybody said that — the show tapped into an audience of teenagers and young adults who were ready for a skewering of sketch comedy itself. At one point, MTV pestered The State for an “SNL”-style recurring character with a catchphrase. The group finally acquiesced, resulting in a purposely noxious character named Louie who ran around yelling, “I wanna dip my [testicles] in it!” while holding orange Ping-Pong balls. Then there’s “The Jew, The Italian, and the Redhead Gay,” a faux sitcom that satirizes the form’s reductiveness. Jesse David Fox, comedy journalist and host of the Vulture comedy podcast “Good One,” says that this awareness of TV’s detritus was part of the troupe’s magic.
“The State were young, looked young, and most importantly felt like the youth of the day to MTV executives and viewers,” Fox wrote in an email. “They were firmly of the MTV Generation of young people who grew up with a cultural fluency unlike past generations. Formally, you can point to The State’s influence … on finding comedy from the deconstruction of sketch form.”
Given the current tour’s popularity, there’s still a demand for that deconstruction, and the group is happy to accommodate — despite its challenges.
“I have no idea why, 30-something years into The State, we’re doing the hardest show we’ve ever done,” says Lennon. “It’s as close to a spectacle as we’ve ever done. We’ve tried to do something along the lines of the Jacksons’ Victory Tour.”
There’s also the fact, of course, that the members are now in their 50s, some of them with children. Kenney-Silver says a recent moment at home perfectly sums up her double life. “Mom,” her son said, “one of your mustaches is stuck to the floor.”