Baroness von Sketch Show-Don't Make Me Send a Lawyer Up There-This IFC show isn’t just sketch comedy from a woman’s perspective but from a middle-aged woman’s perspective. It’s also worth noting that some of the big name sketch stars like Amy Schumer and Sara Silverman make it a point to go blue to try to show they can be dirty in a man’s realm, whereas these women are just organically comedic.
What makes the show stick out as that this quartet-Meredith McNeil, Aurora Browne, Carolyn Taylor, and Jennifer Whalen- establish their voice and chemistry very quickly out of the gate. It also helps that because they pack in short sketches between the longer ones, they generally get in a dozen or more sketches in an episode which familiarizes you with the actresses fast. McNeil seems to be into physical comedy, Taylor enjoys exaggerated facial expressions, Whalen's a bit of a befuddled straight woman, and Browne is more of a jack of all trades.
The first sketch out of the gate establishes its punchline cinematically. A woman is indulging in her new hobby of adult coloring and talking about how much she loves it, and the camera zooms out to reveal she’s trespassing in a kindergarten classroom and the teacher deadpans “yeah, I’m going to call the police.” The sketch goes on for a couple more lines (the teacher corrects the trespasser over whether she’s better at coloring than when she was a child) that continues to maintain humor and establish how oblivious the trespasser and the whole thing clocks in at a pretty solid 41 seconds.
Then there are the sketches that the show puts more of its effort into developing. This week the big opener is a sketch about to become the first woman to attempt a free fall from space only to regret it (“what’s more important is little girls are counting on you, Janet” “Don’t those little girls have Beyonce?”) even though the only other option is death. As the sketch moves forward, the lack of qualifications of the austronaut are revealed and it plays out smartly.. A lot of the sketches are tinged with feminist commentary, some of which is quite good, and and some of it seems thematically muddled.
The woman who reports a stalker to have it ignored so thoroughly might sound good on paper, but it plays out in a way that seems too ridiculous to buy (though it’s saved by a good twist at the end). There’s another sketch this week where four ladies are so consumed with talking about privilege that they don’t notice a guy in a wheelchair who can’t go through, but while it’s believable, the joke is over 1/3 of the way through the sketch, so it's not as funny.
There’s generally one sketch I see every week that has me barreling over with laughter and this week it’s a relatively simple concept: Guy with no social skills hits on girl at bar, but it’s just extremely funny in this context.
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