‘Black Lady Sketch Show’ star wants to connect with you
OS ANGELES — Robin Thede’s face lights up when she hears that the deliciously clever humor of her “A Black Lady Sketch Show” provokes a laugh-out-loud response.
“That means the most. That’s the whole point,” said Thede, who created, produces and acts in the HBO show, with its critical raves underlined by groundbreaking Emmy nominations.
A tickled viewer demonstrates that “we connected at a human level, and that is the biggest gift I can give to people, especially for Black women, because we just don’t have it,” Thede said.
She cites the “duh” moments prompted by the show’s rarity.
“People are saying why didn’t we exist? We had ‘Chappelle’s Show,’ we had ‘In Living Color,’ we have these great sketch shows in Black media traditions,” Thede said, “but never where women were at the forefront. And why not?”
“A Black Lady Sketch Show” illustrates what’s been missing. It offers a dizzying array of characters artfully played by Thede and fellow cast members Ashley Nicole Black, Gabrielle Dennis and Quinta Brunson. The stories can be satirically biting and at times surreal.
It’s from the Black female perspective but with a comic sensibility inviting to all. Season one sketches included a gang meeting with standard HR protocol, a wedding dinner hijacked by a severely woke family member and a support group for women who are “bad (expletives),” as in rhymes-with-witches.
A commanding Angela Bassett earned an Emmy nomination for her guest appearance. “A Black Lady Sketch Show” also received an unprecedented best variety sketch series bid for a Black female-led project and, for Dime Davis, the first sketch variety directing nomination for an African American woman.
The series is competing with “Saturday Night Live” and “Drunk History” at the Sept. 20 ceremony airing on ABC and hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.
Thede is both a versatile performer who “can do it all, from subtle observational comedy to big character swings” and a sophisticated artist, said Amy Gravitt, executive vice president for HBO Programming.
“She wanted to do something new with the format, not just by featuring a cast of all Black women — which shouldn’t be revolutionary — but also by playing with genre and paying as much attention to the aesthetic of the show as the comedy,” Gravitt said in an email interview.
Framing the sketches is an unspecified apocalypse that’s forced a group of women to huddle together, a twist Thede dreamed up pre-pandemic and which she promises will be fleshed out in the second season. The new episodes were written and ready to shoot when COVID-19 forced an industrywide production halt that’s only slowly easing.
In late August, Thede was awaiting the green light for taping of the show that boasts Issa Rae (an Emmy nominee for her series “Insecure”) as an executive producer.
For Thede, who grew up in Davenport, Iowa, the series reflects a childhood embrace of comedy and the escape it provided. She shares that passion with her father, an educator who named her after his favorite comedian, Robin Williams. (Phyllis Thede, her mother, has served as an Iowa state representative since 2009 and is running again).
“I really mean it when I say TV was a friend of mine,” she said, recalling how she would copycat those she saw on the small screen from newscasters to sitcom characters, including Jackee Harry’s Sandra on “227.”
She kept up the mimicry as a teenager, started shooting sketches and earned the kind of reaction that made her think, “‘OK, maybe I’m kind of good at this,’ ” she recalled.