At their best, the comedy troupe The State felt like the closest American TV has ever come to Monty Python’s Flying Circus: a fast-moving half-hour of cleverly linked sketches that avoided celebrity impressions and pop culture spoofs and instead wallowed in absurdity for its own sake. At their worst... well, you got skits like “The Coffee Family,” which consists of the cast running around a room screaming and pouring pots of coffee all over themselves.Every episode of The State (along with a full complement of deleted scenes and unaired sketches) is now available on a five-disc set from Paramount. That’s a lot of sketch comedy, but since The State is one of the few shows of its ilk that actually got stronger with each season, watching the whole thing in less than a week, the way I did, is a pretty painless experience.
There’s also the novelty value of seeing a comedy troupe trying to operate with 11 members. And while the show definitely had its stars (Ken Marino, Michael Ian Black, Thomas Lennon, Ben Garant, Michael Showalter, Joe Lo Truglio, Kerry Kinney), they aren’t lying on the audio commentaries when they claim that they thought of themselves as a true ensemble. Just compare them, for instance, to Saturday Night Live, a show that frequently had just as large a cast, but whose sketches tended to be showcases for only one or two performers at a time. The State, meanwhile, is often at its best in high-energy group sketches like “Precinct,” with 11 different characters all chiming in with one-liners. (They even have the luxury of being able to “waste” a cast member on a part whose sole function is to deliver a single but hilarious non sequitur.) The huge cast also allowed them to pull off ambitious bits like the much-loved “Porcupine Racetrack,” a pastiche of Guys and Dolls that packs about eight songs into two and a half minutes.
The State compares favourably to SNL in other ways as well. They avoid recurring characters — on the rare occasions when popular characters like ’70s love daddies Barry and Levon or adenoidal teenager Doug would make return appearances, the new sketch would function more as a satire on the idea of recurring characters and idiotic comedy catchphrases. Also, The State would actually try to supply their sketches with endings. They weren’t always brilliant endings, but at least they didn’t trickle awkwardly into nothingness like so many SNL bits.
I have no evidence for this, but I’m going to guess that writerly discipline was imposed by Wain, Black, and Showalter, whose later show on Comedy Central, Stella, for all its absurdity, is probably the most tightly written and stylistically controlled of all the State spinoff projects. (Reno 911!, the semi-improvised sitcom starring Lennon, Kinney, and Garant, recalls broader, more loosey-goosey State sketches like “Festis, The Birthday Hobo.”) In later seasons, the quality of sheer gag-writing on the show became impressively high, with the cast coming up with dozens of clever riffs on high-concept premises like “Roughing It” (in which a bunch of vacationers turn a man’s apartment into their campsite for a week) or “One Camper” (about a summer camp with just one kid).
What keeps The State from joining the upper echelon of TV sketch shows like Mr. Show and The Kids in the Hall are the wildly uneven and undisciplined performances. On the audio commentaries, the cast members frequently admit that they probably did too much screaming, and they’re right — Kevin Allison and Ben Garant in particular are so strident and so incapable of modulating their shouting and their mugging that I found myself instinctively cringeing at any segment that looked like it would prominently feature them. I should also warn potential viewers that the shortage of women in the cast means that each episode is jam-packed with some of the ugliest drag performances in TV history.
Still, it’s good to see this very funny show getting its due on DVD. Even with much of the original music missing, The State has stood the test of time much better than the overpraised The Ben Stiller Show, whose cultural references passed their expiration date more than a decade ago.
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