Schad to the bone

THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS Schadenfreude had a lot more hair way back when.

Shows with nothing new are nothing new at Theater on the Lake, where stage companies give their recent hits one last summer blast. For its own Wednesday 25–June 29 run, Schadenfreude is going totally old school, cranking the way-back machine ten years to the days of Monica Lewinsky and Mulan. The decade-old sketch ensemble presents scenes from its rollicking 1998–2001 residency at the Heartland Studio in Rogers Park—it’s the stuff of young talent with something to prove.

Schadenfreude has vowed to retire all this material afterward, possibly another gag from a group that likes to mock self-important stunts of just this sort. So the weekend showcase is both a nostalgia trip for old fans—the ones who can’t see enough of Justin Kaufmann dancing around in crazy pants—and perhaps the last chance for newbies to see the material that sent Kaufmann, Sandy Marshall, Kate James, Adam Witt and Stephen Schmidt on their way to Chicago comedy eminence.

At the time these scenes were first seen, Schadenfreude was a pretty fresh entity: twentysomethings who’d met in Second City class and broken off to develop their own style. A friend told Kaufmann about “a little theater space”: the Heartland Studio. “We were so serious about doing a real show that we jumped at it sight unseen—which is good, because if we did go look, we probably would have passed,” Kaufmann recalls. “There was a dude doing three-hour Shakespeare plays and sleeping in the theater. He told us how to make it. Then he stole our beer. After he left, it was our theater.” The Schads dreamed up innovative, show-offy ways to use a stage, tinkering with lights and music to re-create a high-school slide show and a 1971 holiday home movie.

Over time they established their voice, a potent concoction of gleeful exuberance and gleeful disdain. The shows were as festive as they were funny, and the cast boozed and schmoozed the audience into the wee hours. But first, douchebags had to get their due, be they hypocrite politicians (of all stripes) or stuck-up Starbucks servers, and the Schads mocked them with cheery contempt. Exacting proper vengeance demanded all manner of devices—including the (fake) human hearts Kaufmann would extract violently from various wrongdoers.

In the years since, Schadenfreude has proven prolific, putting on spectacles at Chicago Improv Festivals and churning out 60 radio shows for WBEZ. The core group largely remains, and its humor, if not as technically ambitious as it used to be, is no less caustically skeptical; it recently ridiculed Hillary Clinton’s reasoning with parables involving cookies and magicians. Though devoted, the comics’ following isn’t the mainstream and may never be—not as long as the group insists on highly local, highly insider punch lines. If you’re hip to John Kass and Walter E. Smithe, you’ll love hearing them skewered. If your sorority sisters aren’t, have fun at Cupid Has a Heart On. Schadenfreude doesn’t mind. “Either you’re in on it or you’re not,” Kaufmann says.

The quality is admittedly erratic—you don’t generate that many bits without some stiffs—but the group knows how to get ink and draw crowds. And it’s achieved longevity independent of the Second City and iO machines. In fact, by mentoring promising stand-ups, Schadenfreude probably had a hand in the recent surge in Chicago alt-comedy.

“Everybody in the community knows them, or wants to know them so they’ll put them in the shows,” says filmmaker Steve Delahoyde, who’s been making shorts with Schad for five years. “They’ve got a good name.”

For its second decade, Schadenfreude is working on an October revue at the Lakeshore Theater called This Country’s F$cked and awaiting word on whether its recent WTTW pilot, IL-Informed, will become a series. The plan for the rest of the summer is to stay off stage and concentrate on shooting a full-length version of its supermarket short film, “Phudie Mart.” That’ll leave a void for the next up-and-coming sketch group hoping to emulate Schadenfreude. Or defy it.

Witness Schadenfreude at Theater on the Lake Wednesday, Jun 25. Jevens is the entertainment editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.