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PROLOGUE

I wrote my first joke when I was eight. It was terribly inappropriate, if topical. I soon discovered sketch comedy and, eventually, it would become one of my life’s great passions. I produced a few sketch comedy albums, created sketch pilots for TV, and for over a decade, I hosted a podcast about comedy records called Comedy on Vinyl, as an excuse to talk about Weird Al and sketch comedy, even though most of my guests picked the same three albums to talk about over the course of it.

Like a lot of comedians, I’ve rewritten my own history with comedy over and over again as I remember more and more things from my childhood. It has happened more in researching this book than at any other time in my life; every time I interviewed someone, I’d remember an earlier instance where my little comedy brain had been broken. My introduction to meta comedy was The State—scratch that, it was In Living Color—nope, it was actually Mathnet, a kids’ show that taught you math by way of a Dragnet pastiche. This happened with this book’s namesake, too: the movie Wayne’s World.

“We’re not worthy” was already a quote from the “Wayne’s World” sketches on SNL, but in the 1993 movie, it happens after Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) and Garth Algar (Dana Carvey) use their backstage passes to hang out with Alice Cooper and the band, post-concert. It is preceded by what remains one of my favorite scenes in any comedy film, in which Alice Cooper, playing himself, waxes historical on the city of Milwaukee, where the concert has just happened. His guitarist, Pete, tells Wayne and Garth about how it’s the only major American city in history to have elected three socialist mayors. Eventually, the boys are invited to stay, and when the realization that they’re suddenly being welcomed in dawns on them, they both kneel and bow in reverence, repeating the phrase, along with “We’re scum! We suck!” Alice then invites them to kiss his ring.

I memorized this film as a kid. I can still quote a good chunk of the first twenty minutes or so of the film, because my best friends, Mike Shaver, Dan Gomiller and I would all watch the film on repeat, and I wore out my VHS copy, too. This was partially to memorize it even more, thinking my friends would be impressed, rather than concerned for me. Wayne’s World defined a chunk of my childhood for this very silly reason, so it’s natural that I’d rewritten my love of the “Wayne’s World” sketches, too.

In my head, since my greatest childhood comedy idol was Phil Hartman, I was surely watching Saturday Night Live as early as I could remember, waiting impatiently for my favorite characters, Wayne and Garth, to make it to the big screen. Then I remembered something critical: My parents actually got our Wayne’s World VHS from McDonald’s. Yes, the eatery. It was, apparently, only $5.99 when one purchased any large sandwich, so they brought it home and—whether I had liked Wayne and Garth beforehand or not—I fell in love with what would end up being Saturday Night Live’s biggest and most unrepeatable box office success. I know for sure I waited with bated breath for Wayne’s World 2 to arrive on pay-per-view later that same year, feeling the same way most of the other paying audiences had (not great).

Sometime later, on May 26, 2011, I was backstage—or what passed for one—at a bar in Los Angeles. Molly Malone’s, a small place on Fairfax, had a great performance space set apart from the rest of the bar, where, on a typical night, you’d find musicians, or maybe a comedy podcast setting up to perform. Tonight, though, the audience was expecting Wayne’s World, only there was no projector and there wouldn’t be a Myers or a Carvey in sight. In fact, yours truly would be portraying Garth Algar and my friend Allen Rueckert would be playing Wayne Campbell.

Memorizing would not be an issue that night, as I felt I was born to re-play Wayne; in a show where both the audience and the cast are getting progressively drunker, it turns out you just keep the scripts in your hands anyway. This was “A Drinking Game,” where we did a different movie like this each month, and I was finally getting the chance to act out my favorite movie.

By the end of the night, one very drunk, overly-kind person said to me, “if you closed your eyes, you’d swear it was Dana Carvey,” and any potential bitterness over not being Wayne was out the window. The kindness kept coming for everyone in the group, all of them professional actors, except myself at the time. There were moments of taking it all in graciously, and other moments of pure heaven, living in the moment that I’d recreated one of my favorite films, and feeling as though I, myself, was not worthy of this praise or this bliss.

This is a very small, very specific, very self-centered example of what 1990s North American sketch comedy has meant to one person on this planet. The ripple that has been felt by comedians, comedy lovers and even casual audiences has never stopped. In nearly every show I got to research for this book, I found at least one name I was familiar with, whether it was a household name or not, and in most, there was a plethora of them. While I couldn’t devote a single chapter to every one of these fifty-plus shows, that’s an impressive hit rate. Others, of course, like In Living Color, Mr. Show and The State are so crammed with brilliant comedy performers that, today, you can’t avoid the names who came out of those shows. On top of that, the number of influential comedians who watched these shows and are creating brilliant sketch now is also impressive.

Ironically, given the book’s title, the one show I was least-tempted to write about was Saturday Night Live. It is the American Civil War of comedy: It’s been written about so much that there’s nothing, in terms of the show’s history, that hasn’t been covered to death. This is where the book’s format comes in. It isn’t an oral history, though that is where I begin to retell the history of many of these shows. When I interviewed these 150 or so people, I tried to find the seed of something new that would get me to the core of what that show was about. Sometimes, this was doing my best Nardwuar impression and throwing out some unusual fact from ancient news coverage of the interviewee; other times, it was a simple observation, but each time I got an untold story, or an angle I’d never heard before, it ended up here in this book.

As someone who grew up worshipping sketch comedy as the art form above all others, this book is telling the history of ‘90s sketch comedy through that lens. Approachable-seeming (read: often cheap-looking) sketch comedy in the ‘90s made many people my age want to make sketch ourselves. The home video revolution led slowly but inevitably to the digital age, with seemingly endless self-publishing platforms. It was a massive sea change, all at least somewhat predicated upon the idea that "anyone can make comedy."

On top of this, the actual comedy being produced was ground-breaking, if only because network TV was starting to loosen their grip when it came to censorship. This led, as it does, to the kind of experimentation that can cause both beautiful social satire at best, screaming dreck at worst. Networks were also trying this new thing called hiring people who look like the rest of the world, which by nature started to change what could be talked about on television, and more importantly, who was talking about it. Sketch comedy had never been this diverse, this fast, and the impact that group of writers, actors and directors subsequently had on the TV and film world is unmatched, especially compared to the two prior decades in which Saturday Night Live was the strongest contender.

Famous names, cheap cameras and the internet wouldn’t combine to equal a sketch revolution all on their own, though. There's something about the tone and atmosphere of ‘90s sketch comedy that goes back to The Second City theater and its predecessor, The Compass, the latter of which was founded on the ideals of bringing theater to everyone, making it approachable, and sometimes involving the audience. You are supposed to feel like you’re part of it. We can argue all day about the good and bad of everyone having a shot at the big time, but truth be told, the existing studio pipeline is there to shit out stuff that we then accept as the best the comedy world has to offer, because it’s on TV. The internet has proven that idea to be false, and sketch shows have changed as a result.

What follows is the history of maybe the most prolific decade of sketch comedy yet. It just preceded widely-available high speed internet, and a precipitous drop in the number of sketch TV shows on the air. Drawing first from interviews and press contemporaneous to these shows, these histories show the human side of making the best sketch shows of the era, including some shows you may not have heard of.

Starting with the interviews is the reverse of how this thing is normally done, but since many of the shows I endeavored to cover have never been written about before, I felt it made the most sense to start from a single story, and work outward. As one does, I fact-checked dates and verifiable facts when they came up, but the core of these stories is about the experience, especially when that experience was funny.

Stories about dramatic tension behind the scenes of a comedy show, while sometimes interesting, don’t make for funny overall. Go watch Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip if you don’t believe me. Here are several funny stories about the making of funny shows filled with sketches, along with some facts that, I hope, aren’t too boring or old. Also, if you’re hardcore about someone saying sketch and never skit, like I used to be, take note: Many of the big comedy names I interviewed used those two words interchangeably. We’ll all be fine.

– Jason Klamm