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When a “New York cult favourite sketch group” (as per the blurb) visits the UK, we may imagine we are getting the next big thing. But by the end of a transatlantic video call to three-quarters of the four-piece Simple Town, I am disabused of such naivety. “We meet sometimes with UK production companies,” says one of their number, Sam Lanier, “who see us and think: ‘These guys could be a great bridge to the American market.’ But what they don’t know is that no one fucks with us in America. All the people who work in development in American comedy already know about us, and they’ve all said ‘no’.”
“We don’t make a living doing Simple Town at all,” he adds. Reader, don’t let the status of Saturday Night Live – or recent Netflix hit I Think You Should Leave – fool you: sketch comedy isn’t a golden ticket in the US either. And Simple Town, such lovable debutants at the Edinburgh fringe last summer, are in the same boat as their UK counterparts: holding down day jobs, making films as well as live sketch, just about keeping their team-comedy show on the road. But “we really believe in it,” says Felipe Di Poi. “We believe the work we’ve done together is the best work any of us has done, that it’s way bigger than anything we could have made by ourselves.” You can deny them TV gigs, you can stymie their professional development, but – by all the collaborative gods! – you can’t keep a good sketch troupe down.
And Simple Town are a really good sketch group – or “collective”, to use their once-preferred term. Way back when, they were a rotating roster of theatre and comedy people, doing plays, improv, short films. Then growing up happened. “It came down to whoever cared about it or thought there was life left in this thing,” says Lanier. “And that was just us.” That’s him, Di Poi, Will Niedmann, Caroline Yost (absent today) and their director and collaborator Ian Faria. Now they call themselves “four teens in their 30s”, a tagline born out of a slasher-movie spoof they once made, retained because it conjures their defiantly peppy camaraderie on stage. “A tension we think is funny is to have the energy of youth and ambition even though we feel old and busted,” says Niedmann.
There was nothing busted about last year’s fringe offering, a blissfully fluid and twisty hour that will be catnip to fans of their UK analogues Sheeps. The set (coming to Soho theatre this month) showcases a quartet of whip-smart slacker pals, popcorning from one bit to the next as if free-associating, their jokes – and structural boundaries – dissolving just as you think you’ve got a handle on them. There is silliness (their sketch about three Nasa engineers dismayed that a woman has joined their crew), wrangling with form (an audience member’s inner monologue briefly takes centre stage), and hints of something more meaningful (a firing squad sketch tilting at divided modern America) – but never more than hints.
“I think we’ve written some sketches that actually convey something about what it means to be a young leftwing person in America,” says Niedmann. “I always hold out for [political content], but we don’t begin that way. We begin with funny.” How that works for Simple Town, he goes on, is that “the thing we write on the piece of paper, the scripted sketch, matters less and less. What matters more is, we feel emboldened to improvise things in the moment. We’ve grown to like this lived-in, open-ended feel. Not totally open-ended, but we like to drop into ourselves in moments, to drop out of character, to do what’s remembered rather than what’s written.”
“We came from writing sketch in the UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade] style, where it’s quite regimented,” says Di Poi. “You know: there’s the joke, there’s the beats. Then we started seeing acts” – at the now-closed Annoyance theater in New York – “where you didn’t know where the joke was going to come from. It could be something you couldn’t even describe – just a funny way of saying something, then they’d keep doing that, and you were laughing, and you couldn’t identify exactly what the satire or the point was. But there was this complicity with the audience, something funny was happening. That felt less rigid to us and a lot more surprising – and that’s what we want our shows to feel like.”
Mission accomplished – and if the result isn’t being pounced upon by TV producers, at least “comedy nerd” audiences (myself included) find it endlessly funny. “We’ve always thought of ourselves as a band,” says Di Poi. “But there’s clearly an economic disadvantage to being in a thing with five people.” Adds Niedmann: “The realisation we have is: it won’t ever make us money. We just do it because it’s been such a joy and a meaningful part of our adulthood and our friendship.” Says Lanier: “But we’re open to making money from it.” Adds Di Poi: “If you want to give us money, we won’t say no.”
