Kate Zambreno

Justin Kaufmann wants Ira Glass to come sit on his lap.

The horn-rimmed host of NPR's "This American Life" can be seen through the glass getting ready to tape his show at the WBEZ headquarters, where the comedy troupe Schadenfreude poses for a photo in a neighboring studio. The members of the six-person ensemble, whose name roughly translates to malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others, are all camped up as the characters from "WKRP in Cincinnati."

The eighties sitcom gag was their idea, chosen because they're getting ready to launch a Sunday night sketch-comedy show for Chicago Public Radio this June. "You know, I'm not a headline writer, but 'Baby, If You've Ever Wondered' would be just hilarious for the story," Justin suggests, quoting the first lines of the sitcom theme song they have been singing the past two days. Which makes everybody burst out into song: "Baby, if you've ever wondered, wondered whatever became of me..."

To prepare for the shoot, they downloaded the exact shot they wanted to replicate off of the Internet the day before, researched classic episodes, mapped out their characters, and hit the vintage stores to meticulously pick out their costumes. Thing is, "WKRP" had eight characters to Schadenfreude's six, so "Andy Travis" and "Jennifer Marlowe" are missing. Justin, who works during the day as a producer for WBEZ's morning local magazine program "848," thinks the NPR maverick Glass would make a perfect Loni Anderson substitute to perch on the knee of his cool cat Johnny Fever.

The plan is nixed, as "This American Life" goes on air momentarily, but the joke works just the same. As the photographer shoots away, they can't help bubbling over with their own brilliance, as they have been doing since they met at Second City six years ago. "We're so the cover of the free TV guide you got in the paper," Adam Witt as the polyester sleaze Herb Tarlek, mutters under his breath to Sandy Marshall nerding out as Les Nessman. Kate James, as the mousy ingenue Bailey Quarters, says "Bailey's got to be more devil-may-care." "Herb Tarlek's got to be more, fuck you, I'm Herb Tarlek," says Adam of his character. "Johnny don't care," says Justin. "Johnny can take it or leave it," agrees Kate. "Do I look enough like my Dad?" asks host Mark Hanner, playing Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson.

"My only question is, can you catch my bling bling?" asks Stephen Schmidt, technical maestro of the group, cast against type in his purple fedora and red polyester suit fronting as Venus Flytrap. They all erupt with laughter. "We put the fucking whitest guy in the pimp outfit," says Kate. "I like the way you work it," Mark sings, hand posed seriously on his suit. "No diggity," the others fill in the chorus of the Dr. Dre and Blackstreet song.

When they take a break, they remain in character. "Coming to you live, Cincinnati," jeers Johnny Fever. "Did you get that copy?" anxiously awaits Nessman. "You guys have to make sure he's bored enough looking, I can't tell," says Adam of Justin, out front in his yellow shades and blue sweatshirt, perfecting the Johnny Fever smirk of ennui. They coach each other's motivation. "Nessman loves news. And he loves to have his picture taken," says Justin of Sandy in the back, eagerly grinning so much he looks like he's about to fall over.

The group of friends, who've been making each other laugh for years, are sure they've topped themselves this time. "This is the funniest thing I've ever seen," says Sandy. "This is ridiculous," another agrees. "I know we say this every week, but this is the best idea we've ever had," says Adam. The other Schadenfreude players echo their agreement. This is funny, funny stuff. A good bit, as they would say.

Ever since the birth of Schadenfreude in 1997, when Kate, Justin, Sandy and Adam met (Stephen joined in as technical producer and Mark as host soon after), they've put on small intimate shows as well as grand spectacles like that on the mainstage at the Chicago Improv Festival, where gospel choirs, cheerleaders and marching bands were brought in to further frenzy the crowd. And then there have been bits, environmental pranks that Schadenfreude pulls just to amuse each other. Like the time three years ago when they were bored and hit bars in Lincoln Park posing as employees attending a Delta Airlines convention, replete with deep backgrounds and nametags. Or at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where Justin, dressed as his hardhat-wearing fictitious alderman Ed Bus of the 53rd Ward, and company campaigned for re-election. "We fuck up a party," is how Sandy puts it.

But don't be fooled--underneath all of the tomfoolery is a group of super smart people who push every joke until it's perfect. At a tiny corner office they rent out from the Stage Left Theater, they rehearse for a table read they're performing at the WBEZ headquarters the next day to try out their radio material. Since early January, Schadenfreude has been cooped up in between the white walls, working late nights after long day jobs, hammering out 180 sketches for the thirty episodes ordered for this year. The troupe writes and directs all of its material together, so it's been a process of bringing in pitches and sketching out rough drafts to be polished in the room. From those 180, only a half-hour's worth of each episode will make the cut. Dry-erase boards and color-coded storyboards line the office walls of the comedy war room. Justin jokes that this crunch time spent writing a radio show has been Schadenfreude pulling a "Rocky 3."

The rest of the troupe coaches Sandy and Adam through a skit for the pilot

episode. The pair introduces each other as Schadenfreude's Abbott and Costello, but then start to argue over who's the straight man, which leads to them comparing themselves to Penn and Teller, a joke that sounds a lot funnier in the execution. Every inflection and word choice is scrutinized. They have trouble hitting a line that's supposed to be said in unison: "and we rarely talk over each other." "That's perfect. That's totally stealth," Kate says when they hit it. Adam to Sandy: "I'm Penn, and Teller doesn't talk." Justin amends. "I'm Penn, and you're Teller, and Teller doesn't talk." Stephen adds in: "Sandy, I'm Penn, and you're Teller, and Teller doesn't talk."

Adam is supposed to be growling this line, and he jokes that it's like when Dad does the non-yell at a Bob Evan's. Everyone laughs hysterically. That's why men die first, jokes Kate. It goes on the concept board: "Dad yelling (the non-yell at Bob Evan's, why men die first). But then in the next take Adam adds it in: "Don't let me yell at you like your dad at Bob Evan's." "Take that off the board!" points Mark. "That's the shortest shelf life on the dumb concept board," says Kate. "Next on deck: The Diarrhea of Anne Frank," says Justin. Then Mark and Kate are up for the next skit, which somehow leads to Stephen mentioning Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's remix of Phil Collins' "Take Me Home," and everyone starts rapping. And that' s how Schadenfreude's skits are written, passing the baton, like a conversation where friends chip in and try to one-up each other with their pop cultural references. "Imagine if this was your bedroom growing up and you had all of your friends writing sketch comedy," Justin laughs. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

Television might seem like the more logical next step for the critically acclaimed troupe, whose highly structured stage shows start with Mark pumping up the crowd with the chant "What You Got" and build with Stephen 's blend of hip-hop and urban beats until the "summit push," when Justin rips his clothes off to his skivvies and pulls a fake prop heart out of an audience member. A few years back they went to Hollywood and New York and did showcases for Fox, HBO and NBC. "As we learned, as we were only in our second or third year in the biz, showcases don't mean shit," says Justin. "A bunch of industry people come out and they go, 'That's great. What we're looking for is a fat guy.'"

"I'm the woman. Mark's the gay guy. Otherwise we're a bunch of white people," jokes Kate of the stereotyping practiced with shows like "Mad TV" and "Saturday Night Live." "They have such a strong commitment to be together as a group, and TV couldn't deal with that," says Jonathan Pitts of the Chicago Improv Festival, where Schadenfreude won the Festival Highlight Award last year. "What TV does is take different people and put them together as a group rather than take the group. Last time there was a sketch comedy group that was its own group before it became a TV thing was Kids in the Hall. But they're Canadian."

Staying together as a group has allowed Schadenfreude to call the creative shots. "It's always a longer path when you're doing it completely your own way. But this way, we have our own company, we don't really have a need to audition for anybody," says Mark. "Good call," Kate says, and Stephen chimes the good call button, an actual service bell. "I think we're different than other theater companies or writing ensembles in that when you watch us, there is no clear leader," says Kate. "We've worked so hard and we've become so adept at being one voice." "We're pretty ego-less," agrees Adam. "People always say, 'You stay together, that's so noble.' It would have to take a sweet-ass deal to pull one of us away," says Justin. "We laugh our asses off all the time," says Sandy. "People always ask me how do you stay together? We like each other," agrees Kate. So much so that two of the members--Kate and Sandy-- even married each other last summer.

Due to their connection with WBEZ, Schadenfreude had done humor pieces for "848" before. With the radio show, much of their more visual and physical comedy will be left behind, like their silent home Christmas movie, or the happy-humping Crazy Pants character. "We're learning really quickly how to write for the radio. It's like trial by fire," says Kate. For the first two of the three pilots they taped, they made their edgy material and music more conventional. "By the third one, we had the best directive anybody has ever given us," says Sandy. "Torey [Malatia, the president of Chicago Public Radio] said, 'Just do what you do on stage on the radio.' And we said, 'Wow, OK, we'll do exactly that.'" And so they did.

One Chicago character sure to star in the "Schadenfreude Radio Show," as he does in their stage shows, is Da Mare himself. "Their love affair with Mayor Daley is a little bit like a 13-year-old girl with Shawn Cassidy," says Pitts. One already recorded segment, "How Hard Can it Be?" features 10-year-old Colin Brady repeating Mayor Daley's skewered speech. "It's history, and you've got to respect your elders, and you've got to vote Daley, and you've got to mow your lawn," says Alderman Ed Bus in his Polish Sassage accent. The group read Mike Royko's "Boss" a few years back, which is when they became enamored with the machine, the world of the wards and aldermen that's, to them, so ripe for lampooning. "It's like public drama, you know?" says Justin. "Most politicians are sort of detached and you can tell that ten people are telling them what to say and they all have their grad degrees in poli sci and their Stephanopolous behind them, but all the guys in Chicago for some reason take everything personally and make a thousand assumptions," says Sandy. "I never felt like through a 'dem' or a 'doh' you were being manipulated," Justin goes on. "But he could crush you at any second."

But there are all kinds of jokes, both high and low, in the Schadenfreude stylebook. "It's a combination of every kind of laugh, like the slapstick kind of laugh, and the political reference laugh, and the laugh at the poop joke, and the uncomfortable laugh where you don't know if we're really serious or being absurd," says Sandy. "I love being a little smarter in our references," adds Justin. "Me and Mark have to be able to laugh at it too," says Adam. "So it can't just be about, 'Remember Referendum 14?'" Every show has a detailed theme, like "Abbey Road," where each scene is loosely based on the Beatles album, or "El Train," a sort of "Waiting for Godot" out on the streets or "Schadapellafreude," where they pretend to be on tour with the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus. Like on stage, Mark will be interspersed in scenes playing himself. "Mark is sort of our public radio Jackass," says Kate. In one man-on-the-street skit already taped, he goes to the Old Town Alehouse and makes two falling-down-drunk women read lines from "Glengarry Glen Ross," resulting in fast-paced Mamet speech slurred to hilarious effect.

Not everything from the live shows will fly on the radio. The wild-mouthed Schadenfreude has had to clean its language up a bit. In the office there are mock lists of things you can't say on the radio. On the 'No' board: "There was blood in my poop." Yes, you can say "pee-pee dance" on the radio. "Jack off or jack off?" is on the list entitled "Check with Torey."

There are high hopes that Schadenfreude will bring in a younger audience to Chicago Pubic Radio, just like Ira Glass did with "This American Life." Most of the members of Schadenfreude are still in that coveted twentysomething demographic, except Mark and Adam. "Me and Adam are the older ones," says Mark. "You're 30!" laughs Kate. "We're afraid one of them is going to die," mocks Stephen . "One of us is going to die," says Adam. "We're having a race who's going to kick it first," says Mark. "We're going to milk it for everything it's worth," says Justin. "We're going to have tribute shows for like a year," says Sandy. "With twenty-dollar tickets," Justin fills in. "Like Tupac and Biggie," says Sandy.

Chicago Public Radio is currently bulking up its Sunday night, traditionally a dead time for radio, as a comedy night, with reruns of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and Harry Shearer's "Le Show," a sketch-comedy show out of Santa Monica. The Schadenfreude show will be a hipper, cutting edge Lake Woebegone. "We're low risk," says Mark. "This situation now is the ultimate incubator for the show," says Justin. "They're giving us a slot that is sort of untested, where they don't really lose much by putting us on there." "I think they're certainly talented enough to take it nationally," says Ron Jones, Vice President of Programming for Chicago Public Radio. "We want to grow the show locally, with the possibility of national syndication."

NPR has not had a national comedy show since "Duck Breath's Mystery Theater" in the eighties. Schadenfreude's young comedians look to sketch-comedy shows like "Kids in the Hall" and "Mr. Show" for inspiration, plus the radio host Justin wanted to sit on his lap. "Really, you look at 'This American Life,' Ira is one voice that brought public radio back to where you can do inventive counterculture-type programming, because before that, who was doing it?" says Justin. "Garrison Keillor, my parents listened to it," says Stephen . "For some reason, it doesn't strike that same chord that Ira's show does. I can't put my finger on it. But I think the fact that it's also in Chicago, it's really an inspiration to us to say that what we do, and what we have to say, will find an audience."

Just before the photo shoot, Sandy is trying to figure how to tie the particular Les Nessman bow tie that has to be just so. They gather around and study the picture. Stephen downloads how-to instructions from the Internet. "I aced geometry and I can't tie a stupid bow tie," Sandy complains. Kate tries to help. They can't get past Step 2. "We all have college degrees and we can't tie a bow tie," she says. "I'm already at step 5 and all I have is a knot," jokes Sandy. Everyone gets involved. Justin finds some unknowing public radio employee who knows how to tie a bow tie and rushes him in. Adam and Justin gather around to watch, fascinated. It's another bit. "What son of a bitch invented that?" inquires Adam. "He looks confident," assures Kate. They have the solemn tones of watching a surgery. And then, voila! They burst out into applause, take pictures with the bow-tie expert. "My opinions of the Republican Party are..." intones Sandy, now Less Nessman. "You look like Tucker Carlson," says Kate. Sitting on a chair and watching at a distance, Mark looks over at the stranger watching the shoot, and kind of smirks. "Welcome to it," he says.

(2003-04-22)

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