Masterminded by Robin Thede, the first black woman to work as a head writer on a late night comedy show (The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore), ABLSS is headed up almost entirely by black female comics. The likes of Tim Robinson’s cornucopia of weirdness, I Think You Should Leave, Arturo Castro’s Alternatino and HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show, now airing on Sky Comedy, have followed, showing that there’s more to skits than just SNL. In the US there’s been a more steady stream of successes going right back to Key and Peele in 2012. In the UK, comedy duos Ellie and Natasia, and Lazy Susan have made successful pilots for the BBC, while Famalam has run for three series (although its latest has, rightfully, drawn complaints for stereotyped “gags” about Jamaicans). Fast-forward a mere six years, however, and sketch comedy has begun to tiptoe back into the TV landscape, influenced by the pace of short-form online comedy, where the typical TikTok makes The Fast Show look glacial by comparison. Less Victoria Wood, then, and more Would I Lie To You?. The sketch show is dead, long live the sketch show! So declared a 2014 Guardian article, which focused on the demise of bite-size comedy shows, noting that they had been “largely replaced by the topical news panel show – a rigidly formatted, aggressively male, preserve that provided instant gratification for a relatively small outlay”.
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