CheekyChicago

Just in time for wedding season, a team of four funny ladies out of the Second City Writing Program have tapped their vaults of wedding horror stories to create an original sketch comedy show, Better Off Wed. A send-up of today’s excessive, Bridezilla-obsessed wedding culture, the show will include a Tarantino-style fight for the registry scanning gun, a song about the urge to elope, a family talking behind the bride’s back, and a groom who takes over the planning to create a Chicago Bears-themed reception, complete with wing bar.

Writers Johanna Meyers, Martha Robbins, Stefania Rudd, and Cayenne Sullivan conceived of Better Off Wed when they realized that, after a year of taking classes and writing together, they’d amassed quite a lot of sketches about weddings.  “I had like seven,” Sullivan says, laughing. Rudd adds, “I had been a maid of honor during that year, Martha was a bridesmaid, I think Jo had been too – for some reason we sort of used our sketch class as cathartic therapy. Like, okay, we’re all going through some sort of weird wedding thing.”

As luck would have it, when the writing team approached their former teacher Bina Martin to direct, the newlywed Martin had just completed her own wedding-themed project, the book Miss Manners’ Guide to A Surprisingly Dignified Wedding, which she co-wrote with her mother Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners.

“It was a strange sort of kismet,” says Martin. “When these women from my Writing 5 class said that they had all these scenes about weddings and wanted to put them together in a show, I couldn’t believe the coincidence since the book was about to come out.  I loved it,” says Martin of the show concept, “in that it was a great opportunity to just send up these ridiculous scenarios that we had been writing about in the book and not have to fix them or correct their behavior.”

All four writers are comedy-loving (and incidentally unmarried) ladies, who became close friends during weekly writing nights packed with banter and random TV shows. “We are big fans of the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures,” says Rudd. “They are douchy and fratty and hilarious.  Martha and Jo are paranormal experts.  So we would just joke around, and I think we’d also get stuck on certain things. We got stuck on the ghost thing for a while.  Then hobos, then vaudeville. Then robots. And then the wedding was just a natural progression from that,” she adds with a smile.

A good taste of the material can be found on the Better Off Wed blog, which has become a growing companion piece for the live show. “I think this has potential to be something a lot bigger than just a three-week show,” says Meyers when we talk about the website. “Every time I mention that we’re doing a show about weddings, [someone says] ‘have I got a story for you.’”

The site includes interviews with people in the wedding industry, anecdotes from friends, and Meyers hopes, a healthy dose of male perspective. “We don’t want this to be a chick show,” says Meyers. “Guys have their funny stories, guys have their own concerns . . . So I’m trying to reach out to my newlywed and newly engaged guy friends [for website material].”

For now, Better Off Wed looks like a promising bet for a night of laughs, especially for those in the throes of wedding-planning madness.  Martin agrees that humor can be the best medicine for undue wedding-related stress.  “Having gone through it,” she says, “I do understand that planning a major event for a lot of people with differing tastes and agendas can be somewhat taxing, but at the end of the day it’s a party for yourselves and for the people you love! How stressful can it be to pick out flowers and taste cake? I think if you keep it in perspective . . . it can go a long way toward keeping your humor and sanity in tact.”

While it’s given that the show targets bachelorette parties and engaged couples, the writers make sure to point out that there’s a wider appeal. “It’s very relatable,” says Rudd. “Anyone who’s ever been to a wedding, or watched a wedding show . . . if you’ve ever looked at a picture of a bride in a dress; if you’ve ever had a piece of wedding cake, guess what, you’re gonna totally love our show.”

The show runs Fridays April 9, 16, and 30 at 9 pm.