A hungry cat thinks a burglar is the pizza delivery man. Baron von Sterile runs a drive-through vasectomy clinic. These scenes are among the many written and improvised comedy sketches of “I Want a Sketchopotamus for Christmas,” which opens Dec. 2 and is running select Fridays and Saturdays through Jan. 14, 2023, at Three Brothers Theatre in Waukegan.
It’s all in the interest of saving lives, according to Justin Shaffer, performer and lead writer for the show. “It’s hard to laugh and be sad at the same time,” he said.
“Laughter saves lives, and so does making people laugh. The title of the show refers to a goofy Christmas carol called ‘I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas,'” Shaffer said.
“All of our show titles are puns such as our Halloween show, ‘Night of the Living Sketch,’ after ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ or our Earth Day special we did this past May called ‘Planet of the Sketch’ after ‘Planet of the Apes.'”
The “Sketchopotamus” show includes a family sitcom holiday special called “Spirit of the Season,” which Shaffer wrote.
It tells a cohesive story amid the other sketches, he said, including the cat and the burglar story, and another called “Mixologist” that has a bartender on an airplane trying to heal the sick since he’s “the only competent medical professional on the flight,” Shaffer said.
Caroline Beadle, artistic director of Three Brothers Theatre, started the first Masters of Sketch Comedy Show in 2016. “That year in particular was a year of tremendous growth at the theater,” Shaffer said.
Beadle said, “It was a bit of an experiment.”
To plan the production, Beadle assembled actors and writers interested in sketch comedy. They met and discussed ideas; some of them came with sketches ready to read.
“Then we said, ‘Let’s write everything down, read them and see what we think is funny and what we can do on stage that will work.’ It really was a group effort on a shared Google doc,” Beadle said.
After a silent read, they read the sketches out loud.
“It made a big difference to do that to make sure we didn’t have something that we didn’t think was funny or pushed something a little too far, or needed to be phrased differently,” she said.
Shaffer said nearly everyone who has performed with Masters of Sketch Comedy since then has been on stage with the theater in another show.
“Our sketch performers are already familiar faces to our audience who’ve watched us grow alongside Three Brothers Theatre,” he said.
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He enjoys doing the comedy sketches because, “We can act. We can joke around. We can forget our lines and bluff our way through and in that way we are allowed to be artists in ways typically constrained by the norms of live theater. A dramatic Shakespearean actor is not often the type of person who would put on a cow costume and make a pass at a farmer.”
The actors for “Sketchopotamus” include Anne Lefler, Mike May, Shaffer and Michael Wilson, with direction by Mike Alexis.
“The show will be a mix of sketches and improvisational games to keep things lively and unpredictable,” Shaffer said. One game with audience participation involves improvising a scene on a random Craigslist ad, he said.
Shaffer said he didn’t start doing comedy on stage until 2012 when a friend needed a ride to run lights and sound for a standup open mic.
“I wrote down some goofy stuff that I had been thinking about, and people actually laughed,” Shaffer recalled. “My background in comedy is from growing up as a kid who had to lie all the time so his parents wouldn’t overreact to everything.
“My sense of humor has always been transgressive. If I weren’t a comedian, I’d probably be a supervillain. That isn’t to say our show is unwholesome, but there is a mischievousness to it that exists hand in hand with the love,” he said.
Masters of Sketch Comedy
When: 7:30 p.m. Dec. 2-3, 9-10, 16-17 and Jan. 13-14, 2023
Where: Three Brothers Theatre, 115 N. Genesee St., Waukegan
Tickets: $20
Information: 224-419-4325; threebrotherstheatre.com
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.