Review: 'We're Not Worthy: From In Living Color to Mr. Show, How '90s Sketch TV Changed the Face of Comedy'

Over TV's first several decades, there were never many more than two or three sketch comedies vying for American air-space at the same time. Your Show of Shows ruled the fifties. Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour took over in the sixties. The Carol Burnett Show and Saturday Night Live gave the format new life in the seventies. SNL continued its reign in the eighties while  SCTV from Canada and Not Necessarily the News on cable applied some competition. 

Then things went haywire in the nineties. In Living Color, MADtv, House of Buggin', The Edge, The Kids in the Hall, The Ben Stiller Show, The State, Mr. Show with Bob and David, The Dana Carvey Show, Upright Citizens Brigade. Not all of these shows had long and successful runs, but all of them made some sort of impression on the Vast Wasteland's landscape, and all are fondly remembered by the cults they earned. 

One such cultist is Jason Klamm, who references fifty-or-so shows and interviewed some 150 individuals for his new book We're Not Worthy: From In Living Color to Mr. Show, How '90s Sketch TV Changed the Face of Comedy. Along with creating dedicated chapters on the biggest or most noteworthy sketch shows of the era, Klamm also fortifies his book with a history of sketch comedy on stage and on TV leading up to the nineties, sprints through lesser known programs from his main decade, and provides chapters on sketch-show derived movies like Wayne's World and talk shows like Late Night with David Letterman and The Conan O'Brien Show, which relied more on sketches than run-of-the-mill celebrity interviews. 

That's a lot of stuff, and these are shows that often have very complex histories and legacies. There've been entire books written on Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, and The Kids in the Hall, and I've read a few, which makes some of these chapters, which mostly run between ten and fifteen pages, feel kind of inadequate or too focused on one particular element. The chapter on The Tracey Ullman Show is mostly about how it birthed The Simpsons. The Saturday Night Live chapter has so much to discuss in so little space that the narrative ends up feeling particularly scattered. 

So the book is strongest when dealing with the shows that didn't have as much of a legacy and can be discussed in brief chapters more satisfactorily. There's certainly a lot to learn on these pages (wait... Rich Fulcher of The Mighty Boosh was Mike Myers's body double in Wayne's World?!? Iiiiit happened...), and if you're anything like me, the more obscure shows will send you running to YouTube in search of clips or complete episodes. Plus, the book is just beautifully designed with its colorful hardcover, ribbon bookmark, blue gilt edges, and bonus film-strip bookmark depicting frames of Molly Shannon as Mary Catherine Gallagher sniffing her pits.

Review: 'This Is a Book About The Kids in the Hall'

Everyone likes to think that as soon as Lorne Michaels returned to Saturday Night Live in 1985, the flailing sketch-show instantly got back on course with new blood like Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, and Jan Hooks, who helped make up the strongest cast since the Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, etc. days. Nope. First came a disastrously experimental season in which quintessential eighties movie actors Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Randy Quaid, and Joan Cusack struggled to do what the seasoned improvisers do. Michaels certainly got one thing right in his lame return season: he hired new writers Mark McKinney and Bruce McCullough. This opened up a working relationship that would lead to the show that would even make Hartman, Carvey, and Hooks’s return-to-form Saturday Night Live look safe by comparison.

However, as John Semley’s new book This Is a Book About The Kids in the Hall makes perfectly clear, Lorne Michaels did not poof The Kids in the Hall into existence like some sort of improv fairy godmother. McKinney, McCullough, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, and Scott Thompson had already been sharpening their comedic blades on Canadian stages for five years before their series’ 1989 debut. Semley traces their lives further back than that, revealing some pretty unfunny stuff about alcoholic fathers, depression, and most shockingly of all, Canada’s first high school-massacre, a horrific event Scott Thompson survived. Whereas such experiences would have sent most people to the shrink’s couch, these guys worked their experiences and issues into their comedy and ended up with TV’s funniest sketch comedy show (with the possible exception of Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Even reading descriptions of the “Hey, any of you guys ever beat up your dad?” or “Screw you, taxpayer!” sketches made me laugh out loud.

Though he likes to crack wise, Semley himself isn’t nearly as funny as his subjects, but he basically maintains an appealingly conversational tone throughout that keeps the reading entertaining. The personal and interpersonal troubles, network struggles, failures, and triumphs of The Kids in the Hall make the reading absolutely compulsive.