Robin Thede and A Black Lady Sketch Show Have Blown the Door Off Its Hinges
Robin Thede will keep you on your toes. The driving force behind HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show is as humorous as you’d expect a Second City veteran with a lengthy comedic résumé to be. The series, which wraps its first season tonight and has already been renewed for a second, made history as the first sketch show to feature an all-black cast and writers room, but now it’s the meme-worthy and infinitely quotable content that has people talking.
With skits that feature drag balls for the unfabulous or singles haunted by the specter of Patti LaBelle, it makes for a perfect binge-watch. Still, its creator is aware that intelligent, offbeat humor by black creatives might not have received a platform in years past. “I love this show we’re creating, and I think it couldn’t have happened even several years ago,” she shared on the phone from Los Angeles. “But I hope that the door is blown off the hinges for many more to come.”
The first African-American woman to serve as head writer of a late-night talk show, Thede went on to host her own with 2017’s The Rundown on BET. Though she had brought the concept of a sketch series led by black women to networks before, A Black Lady Sketch Show came to fruition after a conversation with Issa Rae, who became an executive producer on the show. “[She] called me and said, ‘I’d love to make something with you. Do you have any ideas?’ And I said, ‘Actually, I have a full-fledged show that I’ve already been pitching,’” says Thede. “They gave us six episodes straight to series, no pilot, no scripts. They just trusted my vision for the show.”
Thede’s core concept centers on narrative sketches that showcase her talented cast (BuzzFeed Video alum Quinta Brunson, Insecure’s Gabrielle Dennis, and former Full Frontal with Samantha Bee writer Ashley Nicole Black) and wit informed by the experience of black womanhood. “It’s able to put us in situations where we’re not normally seen and develop these three-dimensional characters who get to be flawed, murderous, happy, joyful, and sad,” she says. “All things where we’re not just the eye-rolling best friend.” Representations of African-American women in sketch comedy can skew stereotypical, something Thede and head writer Lauren Ashley Smith sought to counter. “My biggest thing was making sure that we’re portraying black women differently,” says Thede. “Not only in relation to existing representations, but also [by] providing something different for black women to see.”
Filled with pop-culture references and absurdist humor, the show deliberately avoids straightforward skits. If you’re in search of a Real Housewives send-up or Saturday Night Live–style ripped-from-the-headlines commentary, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Shifts in tone punctuate many of the jokes; a sketch can start with one concept then morph into something else entirely. Take the Bad Bitch Support Group, a satire of “Instagram baddie” culture that wryly critiques the expectation that women always are dressed to the nines. The ageless Angela Bassett leads an AA-style meeting for recovering baddies—later revealed to be a focus group for the online retailer Fashion Nova. Thede wanted each segment to be innovative. “We couldn’t give a basic sketch show—that’s not the point,” she says. “Black people especially are so savvy and so attuned to social media that we knew we had to step it up.”
To foster originality, Thede switched up her writers room. Where most sketch series focus on packing jokes into unrelated skits, she aimed to create an overarching mood by fusing disparate ideas. “Often what would happen is, I would take two pitches from two different writers and put them together in a sketch,” says Thede. “That was important to me. And then what happened was the writers started pitching that way organically after the first week or two because they understood the game.” The method allowed recurring sketches like Thede and Brunson’s indirect couple, Chris and Lachel, or Black’s woefully ignored spy, Trinity, to evolve throughout six episodes. “I wanted to go on an arc with these characters,” says Thede. “To have twists and turns [to create] characters that you want to see each week. To create something different and carve out a new space for yourself in this sketch-comedy world, it’s important that people have time to grow with the show and to learn about it.”
The series demands a level of engagement. If you’re not paying close attention, you’ll miss out on the one-liners or Easter eggs that connect skits. “We want people to say, ‘I can’t do anything else while I’m watching the show,’” says Thede, who pushed for the series to have a visual polish. “My big thing was, it must look cinematic,” she says. “It must look like a show that’s on HBO and have that feeling.” As such, wardrobe took on particular importance, with nearly 200 individual looks created for the core cast and Thede sketching out her ideas for character design in advance. “I draw hair, makeup, and wardrobe for all of my characters and create a look, and then give that to our department heads,” she says. “That kind of thing is just fun, and it gets everyone invested. I remember Gabrielle having specific ideas about the type of tattoo she’d have on her face during the gang orientation sketch.”
The cast’s level of investment speaks to the importance of what Thede and her team have done. By asserting their place in a field that still skews male and white, they’re shifting perceptions, one punchline at a time. “Comedy is comedy. What makes you laugh is always going to make you laugh, and black women are just as funny as anyone else,” says Thede. “I think the reception of the show has been overwhelming and heartwarming, and I think it just proves to the industry that black women have a solid place here. And that black women doing comedy is the same as anybody else doing comedy—we just have different jokes.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
