With Quick-Witted Sketch Comedy, The State Helps Keep Mtv Hip

Killing time on a Manhattan sound stage, waiting for technicians to prepare a set for their cable-television show, the 11 members of the State were doing what they do best: jumping in with one-liners like a tag-team wrestling act.

The 10 men and 1 woman, who met as students at New York University, all write, perform and edit their comedy sketches. Improbably, they also make all important decisions collectively, from which sketches to include on their show to provisions in their agreement with MTV, which renewed them for a third cycle of shows.

“A lot of times,” said member David Wain, “we’ll say, ‘OK, we’ll see what the 11 of us think.”’ (Naturally, they insisted on being interviewed as a group.)

“We also grow our own vegetables,” said Ben Garant.

“In fact, we all met on a kibbutz in Israel,” said a third, Michael Ian Black.

The members of the State, who range in age from 22 to 24, are irreverent, dark, a little cynical - seemingly the perfect combination to carry the MTV banner into the terrain of sketch comedy, a format ready-made for short attention spans and Tommy-gun riffs on pop culture.

Since its debut a year ago, the half-hour show, seen at 11 p.m. Saturdays and repeated during the week, has become as popular as the cable channel’s better-known “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Real World,” according to MTV executives.

“The State is doing what MTV does when it does things well, which is bringing our audience their experience in their own language and their own terms,” said Eileen Katz, the network’s vice president for series development. “The State was the first generation weaned on MTV. They are savvy. They know the music and the lingo and television, and so does their audience. It’s a direct connection.”

But in contrast to the casts of some shows on the music channel that determinedly aim low, members of the State don’t repress their expensive educations, most as film and drama majors.

A talk-show parody, “Talk, You … With Rick Spade,” has as its host a hard-boiled, Bogartian detective who gives guests the third degree: “Gab gab gab! Talk talk talk! When am I gonna get a straight answer?” And in a signature bit, a frustrated teen-ager whose hip parents defeat his efforts to rebel can only whine, “I’m outta heeere.”

In fact, the State has leg-wrestled with MTV programmers over how intelligently to pitch their material. Group members say that while they were writing their first batch of six episodes in the fall of 1993, MTV, which reviews every script, automatically rejected sketches that took place in offices because the youthful audience wouldn’t relate and vetoed a joke about “The Catcher in the Rye” as too esoteric.

“It’s interesting; MTV has a very low opinion of its audience,” said State member Michael Showalter.

At one early meeting, MTV produced a list of suggested topics to parody, including Madonna, platform shoes, the movie “The Firm” and the television shows “Blossom” and “Beverly Hills 90210.”

Young and eager, the group followed directions. They wrote a “Beverly Hills 90210” sendup in which the bad-boy surfer Dylan is confused with Bob Dylan. But MTV rejected it on the grounds that viewers wouldn’t know who Bob Dylan was.

It’s an open question whether the State’s stabs at dumbing down its sketches were responsible for some disastrous early reviews. Several critics dismissed the show as a heavyhanded attempt to concoct a generational statement.

“MTV asked us to structure the show in a particular way, and we got killed for it,” said Jonathan K. Bendis, a creator and producer of the show. “We made a pilot, which was very much State humor. MTV bought it, and all of a sudden we sit down for a meeting and there’s this list asking us to do pop culture references. That’s not what the State is.”

Ms. Katz, the author of the list, defended it as an attempt to help the group make a transition to national television from its roots in Off Off Broadway theater, with many inside references. “I feel my relation and MTV’s relation with the State is collaborative,” she said. “I think with my instincts going toward one end and their instincts going toward another end, together we’ve found a place that’s a recipe for success.”

In a memorable move, to promote its second batch of six shows last summer, the group strung together blurbs from the worst of its reviews. Some critics have since been won over. Entertainment Weekly rated “The State” the hippest and funniest sketch show on television.

The Wall Street Journal called it “everything ‘Saturday Night Live’ should be but isn’t.” Some of the inventive spirit of the early “SNL” can be seen, in fact, in sketches like the State’s parody of a high school sex-education teacher: the premise is twisted zanily so that the teacher, Capt. Monterey Jack, exhorts teen-agers to keep their cheese fresh by wrapping it in plastic.

The State has survived in a field blackened with the husks of fallen sketch shows. The troupe has stuck together even though they’ve been told they could gain fame more quickly as individuals. They attribute their ability to get along in large part to a daily “check-in,” practiced since their first meeting, at which each member takes turns saying what’s on his or her mind.

A further strength is that the group was not assembled by a producer, like most sketch troupes on television, but sprang into being on its own.

“If MTV had cast the show we’d look more like a Benetton advertisement,” said Ms. Kenney. “I’d be a 36B instead of a 34B.” They brush aside criticism that with 10 white men and one white woman, they lack diversity. Of the particularly glaring scarcity of women, Black said: “It’s the way the group evolved. Women have come and gone. Two women were asked to leave because we didn’t think they were funny. One left us because she didn’t think we were funny.”

“These are lies,” said Ken Marino, a member of the group. “The real reason is, Kerri ate them.”