STELLA is a unique three-man comedy group.
Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, and David Wain have been writing, producing, and performing comedy together and apart for sixteen years. They met at New York University in 1988, where they helped create the sketch comedy troupe THE STATE which went on to a successful television run on MTV ("Top Ten Shows on Television" - Wall Street Journal), as well as a prime-time special on CBS, a book, State by State with the State, several tours, and a comedy album for Warner Brothers Records.
After The State, Michael Black co-created the Comedy Central series Viva Variety. He was the voice of the pets.com sock puppet and was a regular on the NBC series Ed. He (and Showalter & Wain) were also seen on VH1's I Love the 80's and I Love the 70's.
Michael Showalter and David Wain co-wrote and co-produced (and Wain directed) the feature film Wet Hot American Summer, a comedy about the last day of summer camp in 1981, starring Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Michael Black and many others. Wet Hot premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001, was released theatrically that summer, and is now a regular midnight movie at theaters across the USA. (David Ansen of Newsweek called it the funniest film of the year.) All three have future films in development, and Showalter recently completed work screenwriter/director/star of The Baxter, which will be released theatrically this year by IFC.
The Black/Showalter/Wain co-venture STELLA began in 1997 as a weekly nightclub comedy show that quickly became New York's premier showcase for alternative and mainstream comedy. Running for seven years at Fez in New York's Greenwich Village, the trio hosted such regular guests as Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller, David Cross and the Upright Citizens Brigade. The show has been praised by Time Out, the New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly.
STELLA has spawned a series of short films, online at stellacomedy.com (one of Entertainment Weekly's top ten websites of 2001). As a comedy trio, they have performed at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen and hosted the NBC show Late Friday. Their live performance special aired on Comedy Central earlier in the year.
Their always evolving three-man touring show was originally workshopped at New York's Cherry Lane Theater, and consists of some of the best material from over the years.
Their new self-titled TV series, about their "modern-day Marx Brothers" adventures, will debut on Comedy Central this spring.
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