There are extended sketches that function as straightforward parody, like a reboot of 227 or a performance by a 1964 Motown act whose hit “Ice Cream Shop” makes an unexpected pivot from romantic to distressingly dirty. Haddassah Olayinka Ali-Youngman Pre-PhD, a motivational speaker urging people to “learn to decolonialize your thoughts,” and Black’s Invisible Spy, an intelligence operative whose greatest gift is that she’s constantly being overlooked. There are recurring characters like Thede’s Dr. How on earth do Thede and her team find things to joke about if they’re not mocking the Emmy-nominated former host of NBC’s The Apprentice? Fairly easily. Its very existence in a genre that has traditionally struggled to give black women voices and visibility is already explicitly political. Perhaps that’s why A Black Lady Sketch Show is essentially a Trump-free zone. Her Trump jokes were sharper and came from a different perspective than those being told by most of her peers, but it was still in the same vicinity as the kind of reactive, headline-driven humor being churned out by at least a dozen shows in the same space. Thede was part of the Donald Trump Joke Industrial Complex that fuels late-night on The Rundown.
#CAST OF A BLACK LADY SKETCH SHOW SERIES#
Add to that mix, then, Thede’s superb new series A Black Lady Sketch Show, a funny, provocative, consistently high-energy offering that never could have been made if BET hadn’t pulled the plug on The Rundown. HBO has been very aggressive in pursuing high-quality inclusive variety programming and at least attempting to let it grow, whether it’s the 2 Dope Queens specials or two seasons of Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas or the utterly indescribable Random Acts of Flyness.
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