The State Break Down Their ‘Ball-Dipping’ Reunion Tour: ‘There’s a Gen X Nostalgia Wave’
Over the past three decades, sketch comedy group The State has created an MTV series, a comedy album, a book, and a CBS special in addition to several spinoff projects like Reno 911!, Viva Variety, Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, RISK!, and Children’s Hospital. But the logistics of bringing the large troupe back together for a tour were always too daunting to even consider until just a few months ago when the SAG strike cleared off their calendars for the foreseeable future.
“We’re trying to make some lemonade,” says Ken Marino on a group interview with Rolling Stone alongside Michael Ian Black, Kevin Allison, and Kerri Kenney-Silver, “out of some big ol’ fuckin’ lemons that were given to everybody.”
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After a quiet launch August 30 in Denver, The State: Breakin’ Hearts & Dippin’ Balls Tour packed the Palladium Times Square Theater earlier this month for three sold-out nights of pure, uncut, medical-grade Nineties nostalgia featuring the return of Louie (“I wanna dip my balls in it”), Doug (“I’m outta here”), The Bearded Men of Space Station 11 (“But I have a beard”), Taco Mailman (“Great tacos today, Jake”), Barry and Levon (“Aw yeah”), The Jew, The Italian, and the Red Head Gay (“Arrivederci”), and Porcupine Racetrack (“The recipe for fun.”)
If those characters and catch phrases don’t sound familiar, you weren’t watching MTV very often in the mid-Nineties. It was a time when music videos were still in heavy rotation, The Real World was just kicking off, and a group of recent NYU graduates were given the opportunity to create a twisted version of Saturday Night Live for Generation X. It worked beautifully for four brilliant seasons between January 1994 and October 1995, but it all fell to shit when they made the disastrous decision to move to CBS, which cancelled them after a single episode. (For much more on the saga of The State, and how they fractured in the aftermath of the CBS cancellation, read Corey Stulce’s definitive book The Union of the State.)
In recent years, State reunions were limited to one-off events like 2009’s San Francisco Sketchfest, 2014’s Festival Supreme, and 2020’s Covid-era Zoom fundraiser. The SAG strike gave them the chance to finally assemble a proper show, and they quickly realized it should be heavy on old characters and vintage sketches. “We knew we wanted to have a good bit of nostalgia because it seemed like a lot of people were interested in us and our history,” says Kenney-Silver. “There’s a Gen X nostalgia wave happening right now. We wanted the old sketches to have the sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show aspect where people remember the lines. We also have all this great new material that nobody had ever seen. We wanted a good balance.”
Some of the sketches, like The Bearded Men of Space Station Eleven, Louie at the Last Supper, and Taco Mail Man, were delivered beat-for-beat as they appeared on MTV. In others, they took familiar characters – like the Froggy Jamboree frogs or Barry and Levon – and put them in new situations. “We wanted to take some of the old characters that you knew, but expand the universe on those characters and those different worlds,” says Marino. “I think we tried to throw some red meat to the audience and do the old stuff, but also freshen it up a little since we wanted to do something new and fun.”
That wasn’t always easy since State members Robert Ben Garant, Todd Holoubek, and Michael Showalter aren’t a part of this tour. “It’s not easy to leave your family for that amount of time,” says Kenney-Silver. “And Todd lives in South Korea. They just all had stuff going on. In a dream world, we’d all be doing it. But we thought out of eleven, eight is a pretty substantial number.” (Kenney-Silver, Marino, Black, and Allison are joined on this tour by David Wain, Thomas Lennon, Michael Patrick Jann, and Joe Lo Truglio.)
Parts originally played by Garant, Holoubek, and Showalter were all given to other members of the group. This was relatively simple to work out until it came to Doug, the teenage slacker played by Showalter. It’s perhaps the most beloved recurring character from the show, and they didn’t want to leave him out, so they wrote a bit where a member of the audience comes onstage, quickly dons a costume, and reads Doug’s lines, only to be ridiculed by the others for doing a bad job.
“We went back and forth on that,” says Black. “We wanted to acknowledge that character. But obviously with Michael not there, we couldn’t do it. This just felt like a fun, natural way to bring in Doug, and also do some audience participation, which we thought could be fun and funny and give people a kick.”
Not every sketch they considered made the final show. “We thought about doing Medication, which is a legendary sketch of ours from the NYU days,” says Allison. “It’s about someone running out of their medication during the sketch and the whole sketch becomes a huge hallucination and the stage becomes a circus. There’s a severed pigs head, calves brains, I’m naked and born out of a table. But we were like, ‘There’s no fuckin’ way.'”
Lennon also wrote an elaborate new sketch featuring a live feed of some of the cast backstage while others were on the stage. “It was a little overwhelming at the moment to try that,” says Marino. “I hope we can do it one day. It’s really exciting.”
Prior to the initial on-sale, there was no small degree of nervousness in the State camp since a tour was a completely untested endeavor. Success would largely depend on fond memories of a television show that’s been absent from the airwaves for decades. “It’s one thing to fail live onstage when you’re in your 20s and you look great,” says Kenney-Silver. “The idea of failing at 53 in a unitard onstage was terrifying. We’re just so grateful people bought tickets.”
A conversation with Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall, who have been staging periodic reunion tours for the past two decades, was also very helpful. “I was concerned about the low-tech aspect of our show and whether people would embrace it,” says Kenney-Silver. “He told me that Kids in the Hall were originally doing very produced tours. Eventually they started paring them down because they realized that, at the end of the day, people just want to be in a room with you guys doing what you do. The more connected to you, the more they can feel, the better the show will be.”
By coincidence, the Palladium in Times Square is part of the same 1515 Broadway complex where The State was written and shot back in the Nineties.” I got really emotional walking up to the building,” says Kenney-Silver. “It hadn’t really hit me until I was walking through Times Square on the route I would normally walk to work in 1992. Walking into that building with my bag of wigs was emotional. It was such a complete experience, such a full-circle moment.”
“For me. it was a little more theoretical because we were never in that theater,” adds Black. “But just knowing we were in the same place was cool. For me, it was more about being in New York itself as a trip just because in The State in my mind is so connected with that city. It’s where we formed and where we did all of our work.”
Before they even took the stage at the Palladium, the air was thick with nostalgia since Nineties hits like Better Than Ezra’s “Good” and Fastball’s “Out Of My Head” played on the PA while a slideshow ran vintage photos of the cast. And when they opened with a new version of the classic The Jew, The Italian, and The Red Head Guy, the cast was greeted with deafening howls of joy. “It was so much fun since it was so reminiscent of our NYU shows,” says Allison. “It felt so much like being in a black box theater back at NYU, but now we’re in front of these big houses with 2,000 people or whatnot.”
The show moved to Boston later in the week before heading to the West Coast for stops in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It continues November 25 and 26 in Chicago, and November 29 in Seattle. Plans beyond that are unclear, but they all hope this creates enough momentum for them to keep going. “The more we do it, the more dialed-in we get,” says Kenney-Silver. “I could see in the future where they said, ‘Hey, we have this one weekend in whatever city,’ and as long as we’ve got our tech people, we could hop in and maybe be able to make it happen… There really is something about that feeling of going back to how we began that is so fulfilling. I would do it until the wheels fall off.”
“We would love for it to become something else at some point, like the first stage of a special,” adds Allison. “Maybe we’d do a limited series reunion thing like Mr. Show and Kids in the Hall did. This has gotten us very excited about doing something else in the future, whether it’s this or something that grows out of this.”
The dream of so many State fans is indeed another season of the television show, which everyone says they’d gladly sign on for if given the opportunity. “For all of us, The State has been part of our entire lives,” says Marino. “To be be able to be with this group and do something with them at this stage in our lives, knowing that I met them when I was 18, is mind-blowing to me. I feel very lucky to have met these people and experienced this comedy college we all went through and created. I’m just better for it. I feel very lucky to have been able to live through these experience with these people. These are my brothers and my sister.”
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