When a “New York cult favourite sketch group” (as per the blurb) visits the UK, we may imagine we are getting the next big thing. But by the end of a transatlantic video call to three-quarters of the four-piece Simple Town, I am disabused of such naivety. “We meet sometimes with UK production companies,” says one of their number, Sam Lanier, “who see us and think: ‘These guys could be a great bridge to the American market.’ But what they don’t know is that no one fucks with us in America. All the people who work in development in American comedy already know about us, and they’ve all said ‘no’.”
“We don’t make a living doing Simple Town at all,” he adds. Reader, don’t let the status of Saturday Night Live – or recent Netflix hit I Think You Should Leave – fool you: sketch comedy isn’t a golden ticket in the US either. And Simple Town, such lovable debutants at the Edinburgh fringe last summer, are in the same boat as their UK counterparts: holding down day jobs, making films as well as live sketch, just about keeping their team-comedy show on the road. But “we really believe in it,” says Felipe Di Poi. “We believe the work we’ve done together is the best work any of us has done, that it’s way bigger than anything we could have made by ourselves.” You can deny them TV gigs, you can stymie their professional development, but – by all the collaborative gods! – you can’t keep a good sketch troupe down.
