My Home State

For the first time in thirty years, my old sketch comedy troupe, The State, is going on tour. More miserable crap to follow.

When I was seventeen, I joined a college comedy club at NYU. The club was an offshoot of another sketch group founded by a student named Mo Willems the year before. (If you recognize that name, it’s because Mo went on to become one of the country’s most popular and famous children’s book authors.) We were called The New Group, because we were the “new group” compared to Mo’s. Right from the beginning, we took our little sketch comedy troupe way more seriously than we should have, meeting nearly every day for hours in a little walled-off area of the Tisch School of the Arts called “The Fish Bowl” because there were fish painted on the outside wall. I don’t know why we devoted so much time to this project, except that we thought it was fun. We became each other’s best friends.

One of our members, David Wain had a family friend who worked as a producer at MTV. As graduation approached, we were trying to figure out how to stay together. Through David’s friend, we got a meeting to pitch ourselves for a show they were doing called “You Wrote It, You Watch It,” hosted by Jon Stewart, in which viewers would write letters to the network describing some awkward or embarrassing encounters they had; actors on the show would then re-enact those scenes to hilarious comedic effect. This was back when people wrote letters. Our idea was to shoot video interviews with people on the street which we would use as springboards for sketches starring out group. MTV said no.

The State: dressed for success. I particularly love Kerri’s pose: “I hope it’s not raining because my umbrella is broken!”

Undeterred, the group shot some sample videos demonstrating proof of concept. MTV liked what they saw and hired us. We shared a windowless room in the “You Wrote It” production offices and made a string of videos for the show, which lasted one season. Afterwards, though, based on the strength of what they saw, MTV hired us to make our own sketch comedy TV show. (By this time, we had changed our named to The State because New York already had a theater troupe called The New Group.) And so, not even a year after most of us graduated NYU, we had our own TV show.

The show premiered in 1993 to terrible reviews. We were devastated. We even made a commercial about it.

The State didn’t last long. We self-destructed before we really gave it the shot it deserved. Even so, the group launched a bunch of successful careers in comedy. Members of our group have gone on to write, star in, and direct many great projects. If you’re a comedy fan, chances are you’ve seen a couple of us in at least a couple of your favorite things. A few examples of shows/movies our members have contributed to: Reno 911, Wet Hot American Summer, Stella, Role Models, Children’s Hospital, A Night at the Museum, Brooklyn 99, Party Down, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Risk, Viva Variety, Medical Police, Another Period, The Big Sick  etc. etc.

More than the professional success group members have had over the years, I’m grateful for the personal relationships we’ve had. There’s something pretty great about holding on to friendships that began when we were teenagers. We’ve seen each other through professional and personal struggles, marriages, divorces, kids, deaths. Sometimes we fight. Sometimes we don’t talk to each other at all for long periods of time. Then somebody will post something stupid on the group chat we share and it’s back to making dumb jokes.

Over the years we’ve talked about getting the group back together for another television show, although the truth is, none of us know if any streamers would even be interested in a big, unwieldy group of 10 middle-aged white dudes and one middle-aged white lady. My guess: probably not. Instead, we’re doing something really fun. For the first time in thirty years, The State is going on tour.

Actually, “tour” is a slight misnomer. At the moment, we’ve only got one show scheduled. Denver, on August 30^th. If that show sells, we’ll schedule other dates. Not everybody is participating. For various reasons, we’ve only got 8 of the original 11 with us. That’s ok. One of the good things about being an unwieldy group of middle-aged white dudes is that we all pretty much look the same, anyway. Hopefully, if we get the opportunity to do more shows, more of the group will be able to participate.

One of the best things about working with The State now, as opposed to when we were kids, is that everybody has calmed way the fuck down. There are far fewer disagreements because the egos involved have mellowed considerably. As opposed to everybody scrambling for parts for themselves, now everybody’s concerned with making sure we all have enough to do in the show and that we’re all having a good time. It’s much more about camaraderie now than it was back then. The chances of anybody getting into an actual fistfight are much lower than they were when we got into actual fistfights (Or at least the theater kid version of fistfights, which I guess weren’t really fistfights at all.) The pressure is off, which makes everything a lot more fun. Plus, the biggest surprise of all is that none of us are dead yet.

It should be a good time. There will be some old stuff and some new stuff. And old characters doing new things. I’m looking forward to hanging out with everybody. It’s fun having old friends. I’m grateful for them and looking forward to doing some shows with them. But if any of them so much as look at my cross-eyed, I swear to God, I will murder every single of those motherfuckers.