I’m sitting in a hotel lobby in Austin, TX watching a bunch of rock-n-rollers load out. There’s six or seven of them, fashionable in boots and denim and perfect gold sunglasses. They have metal luggage and guitar cases and they stride through the lobby with the confidence of easy celebrity.
If they are famous, I don’t recognize them, which doesn’t mean much considering I sometimes don’t even recognize friends I haven’t seen for a while.
I’m here with my own version of a rock-n-roll band, the sketch comedy troupe I helped found over thirty years ago. The State is performing tonight, the last stop on our “Breakin’ Hearts and Dippin’ Balls” tour. It might be the last thing The State ever does together; we’ve got nothing else on the books, and the difficulty of assembling a group this large is considerable when show biz isn’t on strike. Even with the strike, we were only to have 8/11ths of us.
Plus, who cares about a bunch of middle-aged people prancing around in unitards?
Even when we were teenagers, I think we all suspected that we’d spend our careers intertwined with each other. These are the people who taught me how to write, how to perform, how to be a professional. They taught me about navigating complex relationships. I have succeeded with these people and I have failed with them. Over the decades, we have grown apart and come together. We’ve had feuds and buried hatchets. We’ve celebrated marriages and children and worried for each other in bad times. The only thing left, I guess, is for the first of us to die. I’m amazed none of us has yet considering the sheer volume of stupid shit we’ve all done.
The shows have been a hoot, a happy reunion of old friends doing the thing we taught ourselves to do. As always, the goal with The State has been to make ourselves laugh first with the hope that other people will find us funny, too. For over thirty years, they have. And I’m very grateful.
I know a lot of people worry about “legacy,” whether personal or professional. I’m not one of those people. If we did good work and were good people, that’s enough for me. I know The State inspired other comedians and groups, which is satisfying, but I don’t try to analyze where, or if, we fit into the larger history of anything. We were kids. Rock-n-rollers.
Maybe this is goodbye to The State. Maybe not. But if it is, I remain forever indebted to Kevin Allison, Robert Ben Garant, Todd Holoubek, Michael Patrick Jann, Thomas Lennon, Joe LoTruglio, Ken Marino, Michael Showalter, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Michael Showalter, and David Wain.
All photos (except last group shot) by Kristen Drum.
Quick addendum: In the first draft of this piece, I spelled Kerri Kenney-Silver’s name wrong, which is entirely appropos.
I retired from music a few years ago. No, you've never heard of me or my band either. But not 15 minutes ago, I got the word from the son of a bandmate that his dad and passed last night. I am guttered.
We go into performing and creating with the idea that we'll be successful and famous. That rarely happens. But in the shows we perform, the practices, the miles we travel and the chaos we live through, THAT is where the real art really lies. Those moments where we blend together as sentient beings to express something beyond our own ability to express - those are the greatest moments of our lives.
I wish the State every success. But I encourage you to SAVOR the moments you have together. They are temporary and precious.
Now all we need is another Stella tour - Michael Showalter, Michael Black and Michael Showalter