Articles! About Me?
On rare occasions articles are written about me or Schmoon. Okay, yes, they're both from my hometown newspaper. Baby steps, people. Little by little, a little becomes a lot.
GBS grad’s act premieres on Chicago stage
By: Sarah Haider, Assistant Editor
Brennan Keller took his first class at Second City while attending Glenbrook South.
Seven years later, “Pinching and Screaming,” a comedic one-act show by Keller’s production company, Schmoon, premiered on the world-renowned Second City stage.
The plot follows a mascot entertainer named Annie, who was once the best in the game, as she attempts to reignite her passion 10 years after a devastating mistake changed her life.
“It’s really fun, even if you aren’t into silly jokes,” Keller said. “It’s an entertaining show with mascot routines and eccentric characters. We’ve got a really great cast. I think it’s a chance to see really talented actors while they’re still new on the scene, before they make it big.”
“Pinching and Screaming” hit the stage as only Schmoon’s third show. The production group formed 18 months ago after the members — Jason Elewski, Mark Fulara, Sarah Cason, Alex Barontini and Keller — met in writing classes at Second City. Their first show appeared in The Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival last January and the second show, “Funeral Party!” debuted last February.
Their topics range from the desperate desire to smooch a dog while it’s owner is out of town to the comedic examination of Italian phrases like “holy cannoli” and “mamma mia.”
In order to graduate from Second City, the group wrote another sketch featuring a character named Schmicheal, a shoe shiner who adds “sch” to the front of everything. The group took its namesake from one of Schmichael’s lines: “Schoot for the Schmoon.”
Keller described the name, as well as the company’s content, as “fun and playful,” but with a smart twist.
“We are drawn to the absurd,” Keller said. “In this play, you’ll see historical figures like [Franklin D. Roosevelt] and Abraham Lincoln come back to life as ghosts. We don’t tend to be too political. Our sweet spot is making silly jokes while balancing smart storytelling.”
Keller’s ever-present interest in comedy and narrative expression began during his time at GBS. The English and humanities classes he took in high school lead him to become an English and creative writing major at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he decided to pursue a career in writing.
He drew much of his inspiration from a humanities class at GBS taught by now-retired Judy Adams.
“Everyday she would put three or five things on the board that would be things that you should know about really cool pieces of art, music, plays and poems,” Keller said. ‘It really inspired me creatively, like look at all of these amazing works out there and I want to do this too. I felt like I had something to say, just like those people, and someday I hoped I could make something that cool.”
Keller’s latest piece, “Pinching and Screaming,” will show on Saturday, Feb. 18, in the de Maat Studio at Second City. The performance will also show at 8 p.m. every Sunday in March at the Annoyance Theater.
Funny people: Glenview natives shine at sketch comedy festival
By: Riley Simpson, Editor
“Schmoon” is a weird name for anything, let along a comedy show.
But Brennan Keller, Glenview native and 2006 Glenbrook South grad, the name is a fond reminder of sketches past: There was a shoe shiner who added an “sh” sound to words, and one of his “shignature” lines was “Shoot for the Schmoon.”
That’s one way to show inspiration for comedy.
Keller, a copywriter by day, wasn’t involved in theater at GBS. Although he was a basketball, track and cross-country star, his first theater and comedy experience came when he tried out the comedy-writing program at Second City in September 2014 and was drawn to other funny, talented writers. They then formed a group.
“We had so much fun that we didn’t want to quit writing,” Keller said.
They’ve met on a weekly basis since graduation from the class, and the goal for each member is to independently write a sketch each week.
Keller sources his sketch ideas from many spigots: the newspaper, TV shows — FX’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office,” and Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty,” in particular — or well-known organizations.
For the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival, Keller’s sketches in “Schmoon” are a song about a man being attracted to a dog and another scene about the struggle between the left and right sides of the brain.
For the first one, they bought a large stuffed-animal husky to use as a prop (no real dogs were romantically involved in the acting of that scene).
“It’s fun walking round with that walking back from rehearsals — you get strange glances,” Keller said.
The second sketch about the sides of the brain sounds straight out of Pixar’s “Inside Out,” but Keller swears he wrote it before that film came out. In his sketch, the sides are characters grappling with how to deal with a girl the person is talking to.
Both sketches examplify “Schmoon” and Keller’s own comedy.
“For me, I’d rather have a funny joke that is a little more absurd and goofy,” he said. “We kind of prefer that over a really smart, sharp take or sharp political pieces. Isn’t it funny how if you’re stumbling over your words, what if that’s just your left brain and right brain battling it out?
“We drawn to the kind of laugh where you say, ‘Wait, is that guy really going to make out with that dog?’ That kind of weird, absurd funny.”
The absurdity extends to Keller’s personal life. He and his friends tend to take things to the nth degree.
“[It’s] like, ‘How far we can take things before we cross the line?’ he said. “With the writing group, we’re very silly. Weird is the word some people would use.”
He and his friends do impressions of one another so well and so often that sometimes the caricatures get wild, goofy and far from the real person.
“At some point, it was just some other character,” Keller said. “Maybe I could write this character into sketch.”
Keller said almost all of his free time goes to either writing, rehearsing or doing administrative work for “Schmoon.” They actually worked on two shows at once, as they’ll debut “Funeral Party!” at Stage 773 at 10:30 p.m. on Fridays from Feb. 5-26.
The hard work hasn’t deterred Keller from thinking about maybe breaking into late-night comedy show writing. He has put a packet of sketches together to submit to agents, but Keller said it’s hard being just a writer in today’s comedy landscape.
“I’m not sure if I can turn that into career here without acting component,” he said. “Most are writers and actors. It’s early in the process, and I’m having an awesome time. If it could turn into a career, that’d be amazing. That would be the dream.”