By Valerie Milano
Warner Media Entertainment TCA Party.
Beverly Hills, CA 8/2/19 - The beautiful, talented, and seasoned comedic writer and actress Robin Thede teams up with Issa Rae and Dime Davis on the upcoming and highly necessary HBO comedy A Black Lady Sketch Show. The women graced the stage to answer a few questions at the Summer 2019 TCA Press Tour.
A show of sketch comedy, simply put. However, this show may not seem so simple and run-of-the-mill, where the focal point of its cast is primarily black women. Superstars like Angela Bassett, Kelly Rowland, Tia Mowry, Loretta Divine, and many other vivacious actresses can be seen in some of the sketches on ABLSS .
Robin Thede Debut 'A Black Lady Sketch Show'
Together, Thede, Rae, and Davis brings to life the multifaceted plots and story lines of black women from different backgrounds, all in the name of comedy. A Black Lady Sketch Show projects the necessity of telling stories and jokes about black women that steer away from stereotypes, and goes towards comedy that can be seen as more authentic, fresh, and closely paralleled to the experiences of black women.
While it could have been fairly easy and safe to portray their sketches laced with type casting dialogue, Robin and Co. understood things a bit uniquely. Thede mentions, "I mean, we definitely didn't want to be stereotypical, but it wasn't intentional to be, like, we're not going to do anything that's about black ladies. It's just that we have so many rich ideas and we - We work in so many different genres in this show. It's like 40-some-odd individual short films. There's horror. There's action thrillers. There's musicals. So we just wanted to show that black women can be more than one thing and that we can be dozens and dozens and limitless numbers of things." Some of these fresh sketches range from hilarious AA meetings and a side-splitting alien bit.
It seems like the only challenge in filming a sketch comedy show are all of the outtakes from scenes that are unnervingly too funny, and hinder some of the stars from moving on to the next scene! " There is a sketch about, I won't give too much away, but there's a sketch about well they're in a gang.
Issa Rae
I can say that. They're in a gang and they're having a new member orientation. And so, it's like a workplace orientation meets a gang meeting in a garage as you do. And Gabrielle Dennis plays this insanely physical and crazy character and we literally could not watch her body move the way it was without laughing. We honestly never got through a take. The - editing it really was a nightmare. We had to edit like fifteen seconds at a time, because it was so - it was so hard. Everybody was laughing. And there were like 16 people in the sketch too and I think that made it tough."
A show of togetherness and hilarity, please be sure and catch the world premier of A Black Lady Sketch Show 8/2/19 on HBO!