A Black Lady Sketch Show review – bite-size comedy as you've never seen it before

The sketch show is dead, long live the sketch show! So declared a 2014 Guardian article, which focused on the demise of bite-size comedy shows, noting that they had been “largely replaced by the topical news panel show – a rigidly formatted, aggressively male, preserve that provided instant gratification for a relatively small outlay”. Less Victoria Wood, then, and more Would I Lie To You?.

Fast-forward a mere six years, however, and sketch comedy has begun to tiptoe back into the TV landscape, influenced by the pace of short-form online comedy, where the typical TikTok makes The Fast Show look glacial by comparison. In the UK, comedy duos Ellie and Natasia, and Lazy Susan have made successful pilots for the BBC, while Famalam has run for three series (although its latest has, rightfully, drawn complaints for stereotyped “gags” about Jamaicans). In the US there’s been a more steady stream of successes going right back to Key and Peele in 2012. The likes of Tim Robinson’s cornucopia of weirdness, I Think You Should Leave, Arturo Castro’s Alternatino and HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show, now airing on Sky Comedy, have followed, showing that there’s more to skits than just SNL.

Masterminded by Robin Thede, the first black woman to work as a head writer on a late night comedy show (The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore), ABLSS is headed up almost entirely by black female comics. Thede herself possesses a wicked talent for portraying ne’er-do-well men with zero morals; as the lead singer of 60s Motown quartet Claude and the Boppers, she turns a suggestive song about an ice-cream shop into a lewd treatise to a woman who will “make my supper, and do me and my brother” (subtitles inform us that the group never performed again, but that the singer’s grandson, Chris Brown, continued his legacy). She also excels in the recurring role of Dr Haddassah Olayinka, a fanatical black nationalist who states that “you have to ignore the empirical evidence that contradicts your beliefs”, because of the similarity between the words “empirical” and “empire”, and decries her sister’s “blood diamond” wedding ring.

The series counts the likes of Insecure creator Issa Rae and Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox among its exec producers, and boasts a strong core cast. Ashley Nicole Black is a delight to watch as Trinity, a spy who is able to walk right into any situation because, as a dark-skinned black woman, she is rarely seen (her adversary, another black woman, evades capture by pretending to be a cleaner). Gabrielle Dennis ably leads a particularly right-on gang initiation with perks for new mums (“just to be clear, we’re not calling it maternity leave any more because we don’t want to be complicit in enforcing a cis-normative agenda”), while Quinta Brunson is frustratingly brilliant as the hapless, insufferable Lachel, partner of the hapless, insufferable Chris (Thede), both of them incapable of following instructions, even when reading their wedding vows.

Cultural specificity runs throughout the show, whether that’s a skit about a rude Caribbean restaurant that turns out to be in hell, or a reference to getting a restraining order from the civil rights activist Cornel West. Natasha Rothwell (Insecure) pops up in a scene where a young girl’s attempts to avoid being hit with a belt are turned into a Gladiators-style gameshow. Guest stars are more of the legends category – think Patti LaBelle – rather than flavours of the month.

The show certainly doesn’t seek to appease white audiences (and why should it?) with long-winded exposition. There aren’t even any white extras here, flipping the usual rules of television, whereby you can watch a whole series without a single person of colour appearing.

As with all sketch shows, some things don’t hit the target. The church where everyone’s prayers are self-centred and vapid runs its course in 30 seconds. Fake adverts don’t quite land. The friends trapped together at the end of the world – featuring caricatured portrayals of the members of the cast who play them – sometimes fall flat, and a debate about disgraced celebrities such as R Kelly and Harvey Weinstein quickly trails off before it can reach its full potential.

But, when A Black Lady Sketch Show works, it works, offering perspectives that are still, sadly, missing from TV and from comedy. More of this and fewer talking heads laughing at their own jokes, and the world of comedy – and the world in general – would be a better, funnier place.