Aug. 13--The Defiant Thomas Brothers are coming back. Why is that a big deal? You might well wonder, especially if you weren't in Chicago before 2006. That was the year the sketch comedy team of Paul Thomas and Seth Thomas split up.
But the Defiant Thomas Brothers had quite the profile before then; they could well have rivaled Key and Peele, I have long thought, especially since they were similarly formidable writers.
By 2005, the Defiant Thomas Brothers (who were teachers by day at the time) had signed with what was then the William Morris Agency. The 10-percentery had discovered the pair after someone saw them perform at the HBO-sponsored Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., where they won the award for best alternative act, alongside the New Zealand-based comedy musical act called Flight of the Conchords.
"I refused to talk," Paul said to me back then, "before I had eaten a $40 steak."
In 2005, after watching a "Who's on First?" parody at Aspen, the late journalist Bob Baker described the moment in the Los Angeles Times. "The excitement came from the realization that the routine was taking about 25 percent longer," he wrote. "Waves of uncontrollable laughter -- the only acceptable kind -- were forcing the comedians to slow down." That was the sort of reaction the duo was provoking.
Although it did not turn into what some of us had projected, that kind of national success still was a notable achievement for a pair of Chicago-based sketch comics, especially in the era prior to podcasts and YouTube showcases, when a couple of sketch guys were far more dependent on reviews and on exposure at comedy festivals, which tend to lead to other festivals and so on.
The Thomas Brothers are not actually brothers, just a pair of guys who met at the Second City Training Center shortly after the turn of the millennium. Since Paul is a white guy from Onalaska, Wis., and Seth is a black guy from Oakland, Calif., their material always contained a lot of edgy material about race; I vividly remember a funny sketch revolving around whether a black guy could ever decently cut a white guy's hair.
The show also had a lot of funny original music, although the signature piece was that hilarious parody of the great Abbott and Costello "Who's on First?" routine, recast to feature drug dealers with colorful street names in the place of "What," "I don't know" et al. You can find a clip under the title "Drug Street Names" on YouTube; the piece was recorded when the pair performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
"Seth Thomas is the brainy, patient black brother and Paul Thomas (no relation) his lunkheaded, not-so-silent white sidekick," wrote the savvy Larry Bommer in the Chicago Reader in 2004, crediting the duo with always testing limits and also for helping Chicago laugh again after Sept. 11, 2001.
In those early aughts, the Thomas Brothers ran their sketch show for some 70 weeks at the Frankie J's MethaDome Theatre, an Uptown venue now defunct.
Like, I thought until the last few days, the Defiant Thomas Brothers.
So why, again, did they quit?
"We couldn't agree on the year to get back together, so we broke up," Paul said, coyly, this week.
In the interim years, Seth has been focusing more on his music (although he has done a bit of acting around town). He's married and become a father since the Defiant Thomas Brothers last performed on a Chicago stage. Paul, meanwhile, has been writing and performing (without the other Thomas brother). He's formed a company called Hardtryer Entertainment to develop content and has been directing commercials for Seed Media Arts. And he's also part of a post-grunge acoustic rock band, Lola Balatro.
The pair (who are both well into their 40s) say their plan is to make "a dent or a re-dent" on the Chicago sketch scene, and also to forge a show that might be capable of touring the country. They might also, Paul said, release some musical singles together in the coming months.
And the new show? It's to be at Donny's Skybox Theatre at Second City, beginning Sept. 4.
The pair have written a funny headline for themselves: The Defiant Thomas Brothers Return For Limited Run in Even More Politically Correct World.
No kidding.
7:30 p.m. Fridays Sept. 4 to Oct. 23 at Donny's Skybox Theatre, 1608 N. Wells St.; $15 at 312-337-3992 or secondcity.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
