Entertainment :: Movies
Stella: Live In Boston by Timothy Gabriele
EDGE ContributorWednesday Sep 23, 2009 It’s been a good couple years for the long-enduring fans of MTV’s The State. After being off the air for 14 years, the show finally made it to DVD, albeit without much of the original music in place due to years of struggle and ultimately surrender from licensing fees (another example of how intellectual property laws ruin everything).
Along with that triumph, Comedy Central welcomed back State and Stella members Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter with a new show called Michael and Michael Have Issues, Reno 911 continues to go strong with new cast member and former State-ie Joe Lo Truglio, Ken Marino is a principal cast member on Starz’s underrated catering comedy Party Down, and the rest of the cast seems to be at its most prolific, writing, directing, and starring in a variety of television, film, and online projects.
It’s perhaps icing on the cake for fans then that the three man crew behind Stella (Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, and David Wain) should find their reunited stage show released in the form of a live DVD on Shout Factory. Stella started out as a standup gig with a residency at NYC’s Fez nightclub (shown briefly in bonus materials), eventually incorporating extremely low budget short films into their sets. Those short films were eventually fleshed out into one glorious full season of 30 minute episodes on Comedy Central.
Despite never finding enough of an audience on television to get picked up for another season, Stella’s television show was arguably the best thing the entire comedy group has ever done. Like the best of The State, it was timelessly stupid hilarity done incredibly smart. Even better, it heightened the strengths of the live show (even as it softened some of the absurdist cruelty) by incorporating trick and comedic editing, skewering both the production clichés of primetime television and the amateurism of its earlier sketches, illustrating the often frustrating and lazy relationship between the two forms of "bad" media. It was television for people who had watched way too much television, deconstructing it by making the string-pulling all-too-apparent.
Unsurprisingly, this aspect does not translate well to the live stage, which causes Stella Live in Boston to be a slight regression for Wain, Showalter, and Black, though regression is kind of the name of the game. Instead of visual gags, the gang enacts a back-and-forth between its members that paints the trio as a group of insufferably bipolar idiots who traverse the spectrum of human emotion with the attention span of a puppy on meth.
It’s such a free-associative rant that one would be remiss to spoil any individual gag, but the group’s repertoire involves bits that pin two against one, attack members of the audience with acid-tongued vitriol, recite poems with an imagined profundity, perform one of their famous songs, and describe intimate details of their sex lives with deeply disturbing sound effects.
It’s still comedy in a suit at its most wittily puerile and its bits still often deal with the histrionic architecture of the stage show, going from suicidal to elated in a matter of seconds and exploding in fits of passion at the most superficial gesture. At one point, Showalter pulls out a "poem" that he "wrote down" regarding an audience member’s off-the-cuff remark that happened only seconds ago.
Rather than simply comment on the inanity of language and conversation in the Twitter age like some wise old sage, Stella become the worst of us and execute our minutiae with a intricate specificity, sharp wit, and adolescent emotional depth.
The DVD contains a few bonuses worth noting. There are three sample episodes of Wain’s online short series Wainy Days and three sample episodes of Showalter’s faux-interview segments for collegehumor.com which are cleverly called The Michael Showalter Showalter.
These episodes focus mostly on guest appearances by other Stella members and they’re not always the strongest of the bunch, but they function well as samplers for their online companions, which can be viewed for free on the web. They fit well with this compilation because Wain and Showalter’s roles are essentially reprises of Stella personalities. Wain plays a misogynist and creep searching for love in New York and Showalter is incompetent host who would come off somewhat innocent were it not for the "behind the scenes" footage that paints him as a self-serving sycophant.
The DVD is full of laughs, but it might not be a take home experience for any one by fans or those who’ve not yet experienced the genius of The State and Stella. For those fans though, it’s a warm treat in a year that’s been quite kind to them already.
Timothy Gabriele is currently lives in Philadelphia where he is a freelance writer looking to score big on the boulevard of free thought. He keeps track of things and provides the occasional insight at
555 Enterprises, his blog.
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