That's right. Your favorite sketch comedy troupe is pleased as punch to annouce we will be going to sunny Los Angeles to perform in the very appropriately named Los Angeles Comedy Festival. If you live in or near LA, come on out and see us. We'll be posting more info as we get it, but for now you can follow this link. Yeah! Following that link is totally a thing you can do!

www.LAcomedyfest.com

Secret Hospital loves to hear if we're being talked about, so we have a Google Alert to let us know if we've been mentioned on a website or in someone's blog.

Today brings us a mention of a real secret hospital in Slovenia! Apparently it was set up during World War II to treat Yugoslav partisans battling German and Italian forces.

All right, enough about other secret hospitals. We have a brand-new show! It's every Friday in March, at 7pm at the People's Improv Theatre. It is... pretty seriously insane, and very funny. Buy your tickets now!

Keith Huang once again took photos of us on stage, and once again I had no idea until I saw them on his site. Not only does he take fantastic pictures, that guy is a friggin' ninja. Let's just be glad he's on our side.

improvisgoodforyou.com/2008/12/09/secret-hospital-the-pit-2/

Whew!

We just got back from a great set at The Chris and Paul show.  The new stuff works, the old stuff still works, and we're psyched to start cranking out more new material in the coming weeks and months!

But none of that's important right now.  The big news is that Secret Hospital was selected to participate in the second annual SketchProv Festival at The PIT!  We played in the festival last year and had a great time.  If you missed Jeff Scherer playing a sensitive panther on a life raft...well, it's best not to describe it fully.  Your envy would be your end.

This year, though, it's a whole new ball game.  It's a competition!  Both sketch teams and improv teams will go head-to-head, eventually culminating in a final round where the prevailing sketch group and prevailing improv group will face off, each performing sketch, improv, and a Second City routine called "The Pad" (or SketchProv), to see which team is the most well-rounded at all things comedic and awesome.

On Friday, November 7th at 8pm, Secret Hospital will battle the formidable sketch group Finger in a Sketch Preliminary round.  Both groups will do a sketch set, and the audience will decide who moves onto the Sketch Semifinals at 9:30.  Those groups will do sets consisting of half sketch and half improv.  Then the winner of that round will go onto the finals on Saturday, November 8th at 9:30!  Will one of those groups be Secret Hospital?  With your help, yes.

For tickets to the Secret Hospital/Finger showdown on 11/7 at 8pm:
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/46859

Optimistic?  Here's tickets to the Sketch Semifinals later that night at 9:30pm!
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/46861

Heroically optimistic?  Get tickets to see us win the finals the next night!
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/46866

Tickets to those shows are a measly twelve bucks apiece!  Want to see a whole buttload of shows that weekend?  Get a $75 weekend pass!
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/46867

We need your support, gang!  Come check us out and help us take our game to the next level!

 Secret Hospital member Dan McInerney and dear friend of Secret Hospital, the wonderful (and just married!) Dustin D'Addato host a weekly podcast, The Comedy Nerds.  Not surprisingly, they get all crazy nerdy about comedy, discussing stand-up, sketch, improv, sitcoms, comedy features, and more.

This week, the episode gets even more Secret Hospital-ly, as the nerds have their first ever guest, SH's Michael Hartney!  Being a giant SNL nerd, he was the perfect choice to debate the SNL Dream Cast.  Which cast members throughout the entire show's history would you choose as your all-star cast?  Which ones did Michael and Dan choose?  And which two did Dustin limply offer and kind-of sort-of talk about?  Listen to the latest episode of The Comedy Nerds, available both at their website and on iTunes!

Well, September was National Sketch Writing Month, and Secret Hospital members Michael Hartney and Jeff Scherer decided to take on the challenge of writing thirty sketches in thirty days.  It was not an easy challenge, as our brave warriors trudged through the valleys of sketch cliches and the peaks of all-out hackery.  But on October the first, Michael had written thirty sketches, and Jeff wrote a respectable (though, let's face it, people, ultimately pathetic) sixteen sketches.  Last week, the group read through a hefty portion of those sketches, and you know what?  Some of 'em weren't half bad!  In fact, some were pretty durned funny. 

Two of those new sketches, in fact, will be seen on Monday, October 20th at 7pm at the Broadway Comedy Club, where The Chris and Paul Show host Sketch Block Mondays.  One is a sort of spiritual sibling to the Pegbeth and Jorleen sketch from our summer show The Dinner Table, and one is so bat-shit insane it nearly defies description.  Come see us workshop some new stuff next Monday!

To see the fruits of our NaSkeWriMo labors, check out Michael's blog, So I Like Superman, and the blog Jeff set up specifically for NaSkeWriMo, Laughter Not Guaranteed.  A special thanks go out to Michelle Dobrawsky for organizing this month-long event!  It proved to be truly inspiring.

We got a very favorable review of The Dinner Table from the comedy blog Jester!  Click here to read it.  I'm glad someone finally realized we were more like The Police than Cream.

Thanks, Jester!

Secret Hospital finished its August run of The Dinner Table at the PIT, and it was a big success. Through a lot of hard work and some alchemy we don't understand, the winnowed down version of SH—Michael, Rachel & Jeff (Dan was out of commission because he works in sports television and it was the Olympics)—managed to put up a show of brand-new material in about a month, and neither the high-concept interconnectedness of it nor the occasional moments of poignancy kept it from being funny.

So what now?

Well, as we mentioned in the last post, Michael and Jeff are spending September writing a sketch a day. And while we don't have a new show lined up, we plan on spending the next few months doing the rounds of variety shows and sketch jams, trying out new material and playing to new audiences.

Most importantly, we have an industry showcase coming up, a week from Friday, at Comix. Hopefully this will be a good opportunity to get seen in front of agents, producers and scouts. We need to being a big audience to this, so we would love it if you came. We'll be sharing the bill with some of the best up-and-coming comedians and sketch groups in NY, so come on down and laugh hardest at us.

Michael and Jeff, along with a handful of other New York comedians, have decided to sign up for National Sketch Writing Month. We will attempt to write one sketch a day for the month of September.

You may recognize this as a blatant rip-off of/homage to National Novel Writing Month, an admirable if quixotic endeavor that Jeff has failed to complete on several occasions. But we have faith in our ability to capture inanity on paper on a regular basis. Maybe out of 60 sketches between the two of us, two or three will be usable. As added incentive, we have decided that we will lose a finger for every day we don't write a sketch.

We are posting the results on our blogs, which you can find here and here. Wish us luck!

August 5: A lot can happen around a dinner table. Families can come together, big business can be conducted, an internet courtship can become more. On August 9th at 8pm, famed NYC sketch group Secret Hospital explores all comedic and theatrical possibilities a simple table can hold in The Dinner Table.

"It's where secrets are told, hearts are broken, and lifelong bonds are forged," says Michael Hartney, one of Secret Hospital's founding members. "It's a place where people are nourished, where they connect, and occasionally, where they dry-hump to orgasm," says cohort Rachel Korowitz.

The Dinner Table is Secret Hospital's first attempt at a concept-based piece, a challenge they gave themselves to grow as performers and comedians. "As we initially talked about ways to give our new show a broader scope, we decided to give ourselves a challenge -- to create sketches with a centralized location in an interrelated 'world,'" says Korowitz. "I think we only realized after we created the concept that a dinner table has so many different meanings and connotations."

"It's definitely the riskiest and most ambitious thing we've done," says Hartney. "There are sketches that are more scenic, emphasizing characters and relationships. This show is perfect for fans of both sketch comedy and theatre, because it's essentially a marriage of the two."

Secret Hospital (Michael Hartney, Rachel Korowitz, Dan McInerney and Jeff Scherer) formed in 2006 and has been performing all over the New York City, evolving along the way making the Secret Hospital experience a unique one.

The immediate challenges of The Dinner Table buckled under the group's collective talent, in the end creating a show that is both hilarious and touching, according to Teresa Bass, Artistic Director at The Peoples Improv Theater. "It takes a skilled writer to find and highlight the humor in what is real," says Bass. "And Secret Hospital is a group of incredibly skilled writers who understand the concept of 'It's funny because it's true.'"

(Thanks to Kate Grace for making us sound cool!)