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!)

If you're a brand-new visitor to the site and have never heard of Secret Hospital, I'm guessing it's because you saw our faux-Larry Sinclair video on YouTube. I first heard of Mr. Sinclair when someone directed me to some wingnut's comment following an online news story about Obama. In the growing laundry list of right-wing objections to Obama—he's a secret Muslim, he's a secret racist, his grandmother looks even more non-white than he does—there was a story about him having done cocaine, and having had gay sex with, one Larry Sinclair.

Of course, in reading more about Mr. Sinclair and watching his kooky videos, it soon became clear that he was most probably lying, if not totally delusional. The criminal record and the failed polygraph tests all pointed to an easily dismissible attempt at creating a career-wrecking scandal. That hasn't stopped the loonies and the Swift Boat crowd from posting about it everywhere, trying to make Sinclair a household name using tenacious repetition and demanding that Obama "address this issue." (You know what? President Bush got Rachel pregnant and then ate the baby. I said it. Now I guess you have to hold a press conference, Mr. P.)

Don't get us wrong. We at Secret Hospital are big fans of Mr. Sinclair's hilarious and creepy videos. This is why we made our own parody, as an homage. We know we're not the only parody out there—how could we be?—but we hope we're the funniest.

In other news, we recently finished a run of shows at the People's Improv Theater called "Blood & Sparkles." You can see the videos on our YouTube channel. We're hard at work on a new show, and we have some exciting news to share in a future entry. (And we'll try to be better about keeping you up to date, readers.)

Happy coke-sniffing and oral-sexing!

Secret Hospital spent Saturday taping segments for our new sketch show, which hope to put up in November (or possibly December). We chose all the sketches a couple of weeks ago, and we've managed to tape two and a half of the sketches so far. Not bad! Of course, editing is a whole other ballgame.

The shooting day went well. Rachel kicked ass as crazy Science Feast girl, and Danielle and Jason's cats performed admirably. At one point, Patrick and I were out of the way, hanging out in Danielle's bedroom with the door closed—I had fallen asleep in a chair by the window—when we heard Rachel screaming at the top of her lungs, presumably at one of the cats. "WHY WON'T YOU LET ME INSIDE?!?" Or something like that.

After we were done shooting in Danielle and Jason's apartment, we went down the block to an industrial part of Greenpoint to shoot crazy cat lady Rachel on a patch of ground that had a discarded Popov vodka bottle on it. A lot of good ad lib stuff, and then Science Feast was wrapped. We realized as we walked away that the smell of decomposing flesh was following us... the smell inside the car as we drove to Rachel's and my apartment was subtly horrendous.

We took off our shoes before entering the apartment, which turns out to have been a good move... our shoes (and the cuffs of Rachel's and my jeans) were definitely the culprits. So, while Mike, Dan and I set up for taping Dolphin Claus, Rachel suited up in a hazmat suit and scrubbed the soles of our shoes in the hallway. Dan's shoes were especially caked with death.

Dan, by the way, was hilarious as Dolphin Claus, and we got great footage, despite his being nearly unable to pronounce "the Razor Gryphon of Tor" without stumbling. (I really should have just called it the Raisin Griffer.)

Remember how you were looking forward to the season premiere of The Sopranos, but you got a late start that Sunday morning, and by the time you'd finished antiquing, the traffic on the Taconic was murder, so you stopped at that kitschy-cute diner that you thought would be better than it was, and then you got back to your apartment and realized you'd completely forgotten to DVR The Sopranos? Remember that? But then you realized that there are, like, 400 HBO Channels on cable now, and On Demand, and you could just watch the show the next day? Didn't it feel like God Himself had smiled down upon you?

Well, this is like that. Those of you who missed our debut sketch show in June—possibly because you were scared off by the packed houses or the gales of hysterical laughter—have THREE MORE CHANCES to see it, starting this Thursday, for the next three weeks. For details, check out our shows section.

What's that, from the guy in the back? You already saw it and thought it was the funniest thing you've seen since your grandmother tripped down the stairs at the family picnic? Well, see it again! And bring your friends! And tell them to see it again after that! It only gets funnier after repeated viewings. There is an infinite amount of funny to be had. We would show you the formula, but we don't know how to type that Greek letter that looks like a dyslexic E.

Jeff has been telling us for months about the cool site we're going to have once he gets around to it: a video library of all of our performances, 24-hour showercam, virtual reality 3-D message boards, and, of course, live chat capability with the tormented soul of our comedy hero, Fatty Arbuckle. Also one of those counter thingies and maybe some blinking text.

But then, Jeff "hasn't had time" to deal with many of the projects he's promised to tackle, such as our posters, or basic hygiene.

So we're just going to take matters into our own hands. Welcome to the beta version of our website, hosted by Bandzoogle. You should eventually be able to watch our videos, sign up for our mailing list, check our calendar for upcoming events, and much, much, more. But probably not the Fatty Arbuckle live chat. Not only is it impossible (NOW they tell us. Thanks, BANDZOOGLE! Good luck cashing the check!) but, to tell you the truth, Fatty was starting to freak us out a little. Um...no, Fatty. We don't want a sip of your Coke.