Promotional Photo

Whitest Kids now, on IFC.

When you were part of a sketch comedy group that now has a national television show, people expect you to be bitter about it. In fact, some are disappointed when you aren't. Well, haters, I'm not bitter.

Yes, the Whitest Kids U' Know are making gobs of money, signing movie deals and can employ the surefire pick-up line "I have a TV show." But since I voluntarily left the group a mere couple of weeks after WKUK's inception, it would be pretty lame to feel bitter. Which I don't. Really. Yet I can't help reminiscing—like an acid flashback minus Ethel Merman playing a zither on the back of a magenta ibex.

During an open mic at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City, a tall, lanky kid wordlessly mounted the stage, took out a handful of toy airplanes and proceeded to mount an intense miniature dogfight, his mouth providing sound effects replete with spittle-y "pow"s and "zzzzew"s and "tuckatuckatucka"s. It wasn't funny.

After I'd done my bit, a hardcore rap number titled "I Fucked Armand Assante," Trevor and I spoke briefly, congratulated each other, and parted ways. I thought nothing about it until my friend and writing partner Jon Kovel, who was a freshman at the School of Visual Arts across town from UCB, invited me to a writing and rehearsal session for a new group he was helping to start.

I showed up at a classroom in SVA's main building, hoping the slackers I was sure I'd find had managed to squeeze at least a couple of worthy sketches from their bong-addled brains so I wouldn't feel like I'd wasted an evening. The reality was alarming. Trevor was conducting the meeting the way I would later discover a show runner oversees the writers' room on a sitcom. While the others seemed lost, eager to add to the effort but unsure how to punch up a sketch or draw a character, Trevor was like an amiable infantry captain.

Jon told me Trevor had a show on the PAX network when he was a teenager. Judging from what I was to see of Trevor's brand of humor, the good Christian folks at PAX may have been hitting some non-family-friendly substances to think he was a good fit for their network.

Two things indicated right from the start that Whitest Kids probably wasn't a good fit for me: Trevor was unassailably in charge, and there was another person whose last name was Brown. That would be Sam Brown, Trevor's right-hand guy, whose dopey, laconic persona was a perfect foil for Trevor's sharper, higher-energy style. Sam co-wrote a lot of the material. A dynamic was already in place that would endure to the TV show: a lot of two-man sketches, those two men invariably being Trevor and Sam.

It was pretty clear that I was a seventh wheel, and since I was getting to do a lot of writing with another group I was in, The Sharp Dogs, I peaced out. By the time the Whitest Kids rolled out their first show to an impressively full house at the SVA theater, my role had been downgraded to delivering a fake stand-up routine as an "opening act." However, I remained a fan. While ho-hum material cropped up a lot, the humor that would ultimately elevate the group was already there. In one sketch, Trevor and Sam played two fetuses in a womb waiting to get aborted while they debated right-to-choose versus right-to-life. Other topics such as AIDS, race relations and child molestation were treated irreverently and cleverly.

Even after I left, I occasionally helped Jon write the sketches he was trying to get in the show, and watched him grow more and more frustrated as his efforts, all worthy, were bumped in favor of Trevor's. Jon stuck it out through four years and numerous cast rotations, but he finally left, deciding it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. All the while, judging by the shows I caught over that period, Trevor was shaping Whitest Kids toward his vision.

Eventually WKUK broke free of SVA and landed a regular slot at the popular club Pianos. They won the Aspen Comedy Festival in 2006 and became a huge hit at CollegeHumor.com. My sister, a sophomore at Ithaca College, heard about them from her friends and only later remembered that Jon and I had been there at the start.

I didn't catch the first season of their TV show, on Fuse. The cable sketch comedy series switched networks, to IFC, for their second season, which starts this week. The opening sketch in the first episode is what Trevor proudly declares "the first song about getting high with dinosaurs," and the rap that follows doesn't disappoint. To me, it's strikingly similar to WKUK's earliest sketches, about gay dinosaurs who would show up at a hapless guy's place and grind to techno music. The costumes were virtually identical. It made me think, if but briefly, of how, in another life, under another set of circumstances, I could have been one of those stoned dinosaurs.

editor@newhavenadvocate.com