“Four teenagers in their thirties!” Beloved New York comedy troupe Simple Town lands in London | comedy

WWhen “New York’s cult favorite sketch group” (according to the blurb) visits the UK, we might imagine we’ll get the next big thing. But at the end of a transatlantic video call with three-quarters of the residents of the “Simple City” four-piece, I was disabused of this naivete. “We sometimes meet with production companies in the UK, who see us and think: ‘These guys could be a great bridge to the US market,’” says Sam Lanier, one of them. “But what they don’t know is that no one messes with us in America. All the people who work in US comedy development already know about us, and they’ve all said ‘no’.”

“We don’t make a living working at Simple Town at all,” he adds. Reader, don’t let the status of Saturday Night Live — or Netflix’s recent I Think You Should Leave — fool you: sketch comedy isn’t a golden ticket in the US, either. And Simple Town, those beloved newcomers to the fringes of Edinburgh last summer, are in the same boat as their UK counterparts: holding down their day jobs, making films as well as live shows, just about keeping their collective comedy show on the road. “We really believe in it,” says Felipe de Puy. “We believe that the work we have done together is the best work either of us has done, and is far greater than anything we could have done on our own.” You can deprive them of TV gigs, you can hinder their professional development, but – by all helpful gods! – You can’t keep a good drawing squad.

And Simple Town is a really good drawing group – or “collective”, to use their preferred term. In the past, they were a rotating roster of thespians and comedians, performing plays, short films and improvisation. Then maturity happened. “It came down to whoever cared about it or thought there was life left in this thing,” Lanier says. “And that was just us.” That is, D’Boy, Will Niedmann, Caroline Yost (absent today) and their manager and collaborator Ian Faria. Now they call themselves “Four Teens in Their 30s,” a slogan born from a parody film they once made, and they’ve kept it because it evokes their lively camaraderie on stage. “The tension that we think is funny is that we have the energy of youth and ambition even though we feel old and frustrated,” Niedmann says.

There was nothing too set about last year’s landmark offering, a quirky, exhilarating hour that will come as catnip to fans of their UK counterpart Sheeps. The collection (which is coming to the Soho Theater this month) features a quartet of smart, lazy fellows, who flit from part to part as if freely attached, their jokes – and their structural boundaries – melting away just as you think you’ve got a handle on them. There’s silliness (a sketch about three NASA engineers who are horrified by a woman joining their crew), disagreement with form (an audience member’s inner monologue briefly takes center stage), and hints of something more important (a firing squad sketch that leans toward a divided, modern America) — but nothing more than hints.

“I think we wrote some sketches that actually convey something about what it means to be a young left-winger in America,” Niedmann says. “I always stick to it [political content]But we don’t start that way. We start with the funny.” The way this works for Simple Town, he continues, is that “the thing we write on the piece of paper, the written drawing, becomes less important. What matters most is that we feel emboldened to improvise things in the moment. We’ve grown to love that lively, open feeling. It’s not exactly open-ended, but we like to immerse ourselves in moments, let go of our personality, and do what we remember rather than what’s written.

“We came from graphic writing at UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade] “The style, where it’s quite strict,” says de Puy. “You know: There’s the joke, and there’s the beats.” Then we started seeing shows” — at New York’s now-closed Anointance Theater — “where you didn’t know where the joke was going to come from. It could be something you can’t even describe – just a funny way of saying something, and then they keep doing it, and you’re laughing, and you can’t quite pinpoint what the satire or intent is. But there was this collusion with the audience, and a funny thing was happening. This seemed less strict to us and more surprising – and that’s what we want our shows to look like.

Mission accomplished – and if TV producers don’t pounce on the result, at least “comedy-obsessed” audiences (myself included) find it endlessly funny. “We’ve always thought of ourselves as a band,” De Puy says. “But obviously there’s an economic disadvantage to being in something with five people.” “The realization comes to us that it’s not going to happen,” Niedmann adds never Make us money. We only do it because it has been a joy and a meaningful part of our adulthood and our friendship. “But we’re open to making money from it,” Lanier says. “If you want to give us money, we won’t say no,” De Puy adds.