Boys and Girls, Action!

Some quick, bummed-out reflections on The State

Cracked came out with an article yesterday entitled “The State and 7 Other ‘90’s Sketch Comedy Shows You Forgot You Loved.” I barely glanced at the article because reading about The State always bums me out. Don’t misunderstand – I love the group, love everybody in the group, and would love to do more with The State – but dredging up memories from that time is just too fucking painful. The most painful thing about The State is that we didn’t take it as far as we could have. We were too young, too naïve, and took some truly horrendous advice from people who were way more interested in their own interests than ours.

We formed as a college sketch group at NYU in 1988. We were unbelievably brash. Arrogant. But we shared a vision for what The State (then known as The New Group) could become. Our stupid little brains thought we could take a college sketch group and turn it into a career. Somehow, through circumstances more fortuitous than earned, we did. It’s not worth recounting of how we landed our show on MTV but luck was the driving factor. Right place, right time. Even a couple years before, MTV wasn’t really doing original programming. A few years later and nobody would have hired an eleven person, all-white, all-but-one male troupe. We got lucky.

These people are about to implode

But we were also good. I don’t want to minimize how good we were. Like all sketch, The State could be very hit or miss, but when it worked, it really worked. And even when it didn’t work, I think there was something there made it interesting. Somehow, we stumbled onto a new and different comedic voice. In the article, Cracked described us as “the grunge aesthetic of Nirvana had its DIY counterpart in The State,” which I think is a pretty good analogy of what were doing.

Some of what we were doing was purely a reaction to the stuff we saw on TV, particularly SNL, which was going through an abysmal period that relied almost exclusively on pounding catch phrases into viewers’ heads. Remember the “Buh-bye” stewardesses? At that time, SNL had an aggressively frat bro vibe that repulsed us. We wanted to do whatever we could to be not like them. Instead, we tried to figure out a way to become some kind of American Monty Python, celebrating stupidity in a timeless way. Smart stupidity. That’s what we were going for. Our sketches, particularly after our first season when we kowtowed a bit too much to MTV’s pop culture mandate, were meant to be evergreen, things you could watch years from when they were made and still find them funny. Did we succeed? I have no idea. I haven’t watched a State sketch in years and years.

Here’s a pretty good example of the kind of stupidity we loved:

Fortunately, The MTV audience quickly found us and embraced us. We didn’t know anything about ratings at the time, but we knew we were doing well. We also gained more confidence in our collective voice and started to understand, in a much deeper way, who we were. By our third season, we had hit our stride, producing a ton of funny stuff that had less to do with our inspirations and more to do with who we were as people.

At the same time, the pressure was intense. The State never had a formal organizational structure. Nobody was in charge. Our producer, Jim Sharp, did an incredible job keeping us focused and corralled to the best of his ability, but the way we made any creative decision was to discuss it half to death and then vote. It was an inefficient and exhausting way to conduct business. In a group that big, cliques were bound to form – and did. Everybody was constantly jockeying for screen time, which meant lobbying for the sketches we wrote to make it through because the writer got to cast the sketch. People got pissed at each other, rivalries started, tempers frayed. Whatever insecurities any one of us had got magnified tenfold. The twenty-three-year-old ego is a mighty thing to behold. It will pit you against your best friends. That’s what it did to us. Frankly, it started to kind of suck to be in The State.

Compounding the problem were our managers telling us that we should bail on MTV and jump to the Big Leagues. The networks. We could go head-to-head against SNL. So we did. Again, because we were too young and stupid to pull the brakes on a big jump and get our feet more solidly under us. We came within a hair’s breadth of signing a deal with ABC that would have put us on Saturday nights to go up against SNL, only to have the deal snatched away at the last second because somebody on our team – whether our agents or managers, I still don’t know – got greedy and asked for the moon. When the ABC deal fell apart, CBS gave us a shot.

At the time CBS was the Murder, She Wrote network, a place where geriatrics came to spend their evenings in the comfort of boring TV shows about boring people. You know, kind of like they are now. They had a new CEO, Les Moonves, who promised to inject some youth into the channel. So it made a weird kind of sense to bring the hot young thing over to the Tiffany Network and give us a shot. The deal was they would give us three specials to introduce us to the CBS audience and then put us up against SNL.

Our debut Halloween Special on CBS was the lowest-rated network show of the week. Not just on CBS. All networks (minus the fledgling WB and Paramount networks). I guess the Murder, She Wrote network wasn’t ready for “With special musical guest, Sonic Youth!” We got fired three days after it aired. And, just like that, we were done. It took a while to sink in. We thought maybe we’d do a movie or something. We put out a book. Recorded a (bad, drunken) album. But we were done.

I’m proud of The State. But the thing I care most about are the relationships I have with those guys (and girl). I remain on great terms with everybody in the group and count them among my dearest friends. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for any of them (except loan them money because fuck them.) I’ve also been so proud to see the great work they’ve all gone on to do. State members have been involved in so many awesome TV shows and movies, and it’s been cool to see groups inspired by The State also make their way into the top tiers of comedy.

Yes, I wish we’d it taken it further. Yes, I wish we’d been smarter. More mature. More selfless I wish we’d been able to get out of our own way to see the thing all the way through. But I’m also grateful for what we did have. And I’m grateful for the friendships I continue to share with them. They’re good people. They’re my people. I love them. Awww yeah.