Chicago improv group 3Peat spoofs horror tropes about black characters in Comedy Central video
A group of friends, all black, run through the woods one night and barricade themselves inside an empty house. “We’re being chased by a psycho killer!” one of them says. “I told y’all, black people have no business camping,” another says. “This is black karma!”
Skewering both horror movie tropes and racial stereotypes, “The Blackening” is a one-off video collaboration from Comedy Central and the Chicago-based improv group 3Peat and it is hilarious, both silly and smart and nothing short of a calling card for the collective talents herein.
Available on YouTube and directed by Chioke Nassor (a former writer on “Late Night with Seth Meyers”), the video’s premise asks: “The black cast member is always the first to die in a horror movie, but what happens when everyone is black?” What transpires next is a cascade of protestations:
“I am very white, I watch ‘Gilmore Girls’ every day!” And “I’m so white, I let my dog kiss me on the mouth.”
The members of 3Peat play themselves: Lisa Beasley, Allison Blair, Shantira Jackson, Torian Miller, Nnamdi Ngwe, Dewayne Perkins, Patrick Rowland and John Thibodeaux. (There are nine members in total; “Saturday Night Live” cast member Chris Redd is also member of 3Peat but was unavailable for the video.)
“The Blackening” was an idea sparked by Perkins “because there’s this ongoing joke about how black people don’t like camping,” Jackson said in a phone interview, along with Beasley and Ngwe. “And he was like, ‘Hey, I want to turn this into something,’ and he brought the framework to the group and then we all added a part of ourselves to it — those characters are very rooted in who we are and those jokes (reference) our own personalities.”
Beasley added, “I actually do watch ‘The Gilmore Girls’ every day and right now I’m literally wearing a shirt that says ‘I drink coffee like a Gilmore.’ So we used our own lives to heighten the situation.”
Despite the video’s success, last weekend she tweeted out, “Told my daughter ‘Mommy’s video got over 2 million views on Facebook. Wanna see it?’ and she said, ‘I wanna watch llama llama on your phone.’”
The group used to perform weekly at iO Theater but has paused that for the time being. They are currently performing in other cities including Atlanta, Dallas and Boston. “We’ll be back doing shows in Chicago this summer,” Ngwe said.
3Peat is a seriously talented group; I’ve seen them perform live and they are among the best. They’d like to get TV opportunities as a group, but it’s the rare ensemble that’s been able to do that. You can count the exceptions on your hand: Broken Lizard (which formed at Colgate University and has a new “Super Troopers” movie coming out), the Upright Citizens Brigade (which includes Amy Poehler and had a cult-hit TV series on Comedy Central before launching the UCB Theatre) and The Katydids (the Chicago-formed group that now stars on TV Land’s “Teachers”).
Improv and sketch still remains predominantly white and male, which is why 3Peat as a group feels especially vital. “Just the numbers, there’s more white dudes,” said Jackson. “Those are also the ones who can afford it. If you talk about classes — if you want to take a sketch class, it’s $300. Whereas if you want to do standup, why not just get a pad (of paper) and do it for free? So economically the people who can afford it are usually affluent white people.”
Both Beasley and Jackson are Second City alums; Thibodeaux is currently a writer for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
At the moment, Comedy Central is not developing a TV show with the group — but the video is an argument that the network should be.
As Robin Thede, a former Chicago performer herself and host of BET’s “The Rundown with Robin Thede” said on Twitter, “Why just one sketch when they could have their own show?!”