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Article Launched: 06/27/2005 01:00:00 AM joanne ostrow "Stella" new millennium's Marx Bros. By Joanne Ostrow Denver Post TV Critic

From left, Michael Ian Black, David Wain and Michael Showalter in the sketch comedy "Stella." (Scott Pasfield) "STELLA!" The name doesn't mean anything, but you can scream it with an anguished cry, à la Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire," and feel part of American cultural history. It's a bit early to make any predictions about whether "Stella," a new half-hour sketch comedy, will land in the pop-culture canon. But the show is promising. It launches at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday on Comedy Central. Launched from the long-running stage revue, "Stella" is a three-dimensional cartoon - make that a trio of vaudevillians in business suits - playacting their way from downtown Manhattan nightclubs to a less raunchy berth on cable television. The comedy is more collaborative than stand-up. Their presentation integrates film techniques and time-tested improv. Performance art blends with filmed adventures, adolescent gags and clever parodies in Stella's inventive melange, which beats the usual late-night joke telling in a faux club setting that's so familiar on cable TV. And there's no minimum. Absurdist is the only way to describe it, a three-man Monty Python for the new millennium, complete with video trickery. At times, it seems the three are distinct, warring facets of a single stunted, prepubescent male personality. Other times, not so much. "Stella" boasts three former members of MTV's cult favorite "The State," Michael Showalter, David Wain and Michael Ian Black. Wain and Showalter co-wrote the summer camp sendup "Wet Hot American Summer." They were part of VH-1's "I Love the '70s" and "I Love the '80s." You may recognize Black from NBC's late dramedy "Ed." Black created "Viva Variety" for Comedy Central and was the voice of the pets.com sock puppet. The TV version of Stella allows them to write, produce and perform favorite bits from over the years with enough quick editing (ie. fake footage of the business-suited trio skate boarding) to keep it visually engaging. Always in character, the three dance very badly, make faces at the camera, pose in an idiotic "tableau," mix a "Flashdance" parody with the impossible physics of old Warner Bros. cartoons and send up an apartment co-op election and "The Manchurian Candidate." The pranks and non sequiturs come together around a nominal storyline, such as the mundane travails of three imbecile roommates being evicted from an apartment and renting it again. Had the Marx Brothers stayed an alternative, underground comedy act Advertisement rather than finding fame in Hollywood, they might have been reborn as Stella. Stella began in 1997 as a Greenwich Village nightclub revue with guest appearances by Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller and David Cross ("Arrested Development"), as well as the New York sketch comedy and improv troupe, "The Upright Citizen's Brigade," which similarly specializes in rather deranged sketch comedy. It's not as in-your-face rude as the average stand-up routine. In one sketch, the guys tell the landlord the apartment keys are under the mat. Where's the mat? At the cleaners. The landlord retrieves the mat, puts it in front of the door, lifts up a corner and there's the key! It's cartoon jokey, prolonged and inane, but funny as a sort of old-school clowning calisthenic. They reinvent some of animation's old standards with a deconstruction that makes their shtick feel "alternative." The antics elude description. Check out video bits streamed at the group's website: stella comedy.com. Comedy Central advertises "Stella" as "dumb comedy dressed in a suit," but that undersells the group. They're only as dumb as they want to be. These boys dressed as men know what they're doing, whether it's barking, hopping or performing surgery with flashlights tied to their heads. The references range from funk rock to Nazi hunting. Their madcap alt-comedy is a liberating look at what comedy can be at a time when rigor mortis is setting in on the traditional, narrative TV sitcom. The members of "Stella" have written and performed comedy for some 16 years, since meeting at New York University and bonding to help create The State. They haven't gotten too slick, they haven't gotten too sick. In fact, they're just about sick enough. TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.

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