Comedy Week III: Stelllaaaa!

If you're looking for more meta-comedy that was too good to last, you can't go wrong with Stella.

The sitcom, which featured Michael Ian Black, David Wain, and Michael Showalter perfecting the characters they'd tried out on New York comedy stages, is hard to explain. Or maybe it's not.

It's the Marx Brothers for the post Internet, 21st century age.

Stella is absurd in just about every way. Each episode bends time and convention, plays with notions familiar from a thousand sitcoms before it, and also the comedy shorts that once ruled the cinemas, whether they were the Marx Brothers, or Abbot and Costello, or The Goodies.

So simultaneously there's something fresh and new, and old and kind of sweet about the anarchy of the show. (How can you not love a group of men-child who yell, "Yayyy!" in unison everytime something good happens?

Michael Ian Black (who might be familiar from Ed...anyone? Anyone? Okay, your loss) is the snarky ringleader. David Wain is the hopless third also ran (who still, hilariously, manages to always score with women.) And Michael Showalter is Zeppo.




Well, he is.

It's hard to pick which of these eps are my favorite. Maybe the one where they open the coffee shop, which has the single greatest throwaway comedy ending I think I've ever seen. The one where the boys grow crops in their apartments and go through a rags to riches cycle of peasant farmers to agro-lords and back in a week is pretty biting, too. (In fact, one of the great charms of the series is how they go through huge changes in impossibly short timeframes.)

Oh, sure, I never quite recovered from the disappointment of Rashida Jones (Karen on The Office) not being one of the neighbors, (she left after the pilot) but the high-octane absurdity of Stella is hard to dislike. I once said (back when it was funny) that I couldn't see myself ever dating a woman who didn't laugh at The Simpsons. I would amend that to say if there's not something that makes you laugh in Stella, you're just not somebody who encourages joy in your life.

I mean, they're working so damn hard to please you.

Stella grew out of the late, lamented MTV show The State, which spawned a series of 28 popular short films filmed between 1998 and 2002, most of which you can still find on College Humor. They also have an official website.



For the celebrity whores among you, guest stars on Stella's 10 episodes included Paul Rudd, Sam Rockwell, Topher Grace, Tim Blake Nelson, Alan Ruck, Janeane Garofalo, and Edward Norton.

The DVD has a fairly extensive interview that gives you the group's history -- and if you have any interest in how you hone a stage comedy act, it's pretty revealing. Especially when you can compare it to the Comedy Central Presents stage peformance, also on the disc.

Comedy Central allowed the show to wither and die after only one season, first broadcast in 2005. It's really too bad. But luckily, it's now on DVD so you may enjoy it again and again. I did.

It's depressing to note, as Michael Ian Black does on one of the commentary tracks: “It’s worth making the point that when we were making this, we thought we were making totally mainstream comedy.”



The fact that it's not mainstream - that in fact, most people don't have any room for Stella while Dane Cook... no. no. I've used that one so much it's practically a clam. Anyway...when I scratch my head and go, "uh oh" about Comedy's Future, Stella is one of the things I'm thinking about.

I've never seen Wet Hot American Summer (a movie they're responsible for...but I might have to mourn my way down to the video store to get it sometime soon.)

EDIT: 15 March: I should say, to clarify, the posts that exist here are not clips from the Stella sitcom -- they're from the Stella shorts that were shown at their stage shows. In that vein, they're generally a lot dirtier and a bit more frenetic than the series, which actually followed their plots and brought out their themes cleanly.

"Whooooo iiiiis iiiit?"