UPTOWN — The "Lollapalooza [of] sketch comedy" is coming to Lakeview, and its headliners are a lot more local.
Scattered throughout the 168 acts scheduled to appear at The Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival in January is a host of comedians and performers hailing from Uptown and Andersonville.
From Jan. 7-17 at Stage 773, at 1225 W. Belmont Ave., the 15th annual sketch festival will showcase 186 sketch comedy shows.
The lineup includes first-timers, like Andersonville resident Noah Ginex's puppet company's "The Saturday Afternoon Monster and Piggie Variety Show" a.k.a. SNORF!, as well as seasoned vets like Andersonville resident Seth Thomas, who will make his fourth appearance at the festival with The Defiant Thomas Brothers.
"For me, it's very fun to and exciting to be a part of it again, since I've been a part of it since the beginning," said Thomas, who has appeared in the festival in two other groups, making January's performance his sixth. "It's a fantastic wasy to see all the sketch going on out there."
The Defiant Thomas Brothers used to run out of a black box theater in Uptown before rising to the national stage at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, where they won the best sketch group award and finished runner up to best alternative act, which was given to Flight of the Conchords. The group will perform at 10 p.m. on Jan. 9 and at 8 p.m. Jan. 16.
The group, which consists of Seth Thomas and Paul Thomas who met at a Second City Training Center, broke up in 2006. They recently reunited, but in between have done "nothing as a group" and "a lot of exploring things individually," Seth Thomas said.
"I was doing a lot of music, mostly hip hop," he said. "The backdrop of everything we do is organic. We gravitated back towards each other. Maybe it was something in the air: you know, the Dixie Chicks got back together."
While the Defiant Thomas Brothers' show focuses on a traditional two-man comedy team setup, playing all the characters and building on the songs and sketches, Uptown resident Caroline Nash's Dead Broads Yapping shows the diversity sketch comedy.
Dead Girls Yapping features some of history's most "influential, enigmatic women." Their show will be at 2 p.m. on Jan. 10 on the Pro stage.
"It's like 'The View' or a money talk show set in the after life," said Nash adding the idea sprung from a discussion about the Kennedy family.
"We make them more than historical characters. They're people you want to hang out with. We wanted to make history more relevant to the things we see on TV."
Nash, who's performing for her second year with the group, described the festival as "Lollapalooza for sketch comedy," with several shows happening every hour, allowing attendees to see groups they love and discover new ones.
Aside from Dead Girls Yapping, Nash will also appear in "Eli and Jessica Present: Friends: The One Where They Sing" at 5 p.m. Jan. 16 on the Pro stage.
"It's such a rush. It's really cool to see more than your friends that are usually at [your] show. There's people coming from across the world. It's a realy cool thing to be a part of," said Nash.
Noah Ginex, 35, of Andersonville, has dreamed of doing the sketch comedy festival for years, but never found the time. In January, he'll debut his puppet variety show featuring a cast of ridiculous characters, songs, sketches, musical improv and viewer mail for the first time at the sketch comedy festival.
"Honestly, we've been looking at doing Sketch Fest for a couple years and we've always been too busy to do, or even apply to do Sketch Fest," said Ginex, adding that this year, the timing was perfect. "We wanted to do the show again for people. Sketch Fest was the best way to get our show seen by as many people as possible. And it's very easy for us to do our show."
Tickets to individual shows are $15. All-festival passes are $115 until Dec 31 and will jump to $165 after. Indivual day passes are also available for a variation of prices dependent on the day.
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