A Black Lady Sketch Show season 1 premiere recap

A Black Lady Sketch Show kicks off its first season with a bang, bringing in some big guest stars and even bigger jokes.

A Black Lady Sketch Show stars Robin Thede, Gabrielle Dennis, Quinta Brunson and Ashley Nicole Black and features an opening theme by Megan Thee Stallion and puppet versions of the four women.

While it’s not fair to compare this show to Key & Peele, because this show is incredibly in its own respect and deserves to be talked about that way, the set up will feel very familiar to those familiar with the former sketch show. It feels nice to have this kind of sketch comedy back on television.

Between the sketches listed below are interstitials of the four women as themselves sitting around drinking and talking hours after a mysterious “event” occurred.

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The notable moments in these are their jokes and the commentary around what they can still like after revelations about the awful behavior of certain men. Can you still like Lethal Weapon for Danny Glover even though Mel Gibson is racist? How about enjoying a meme of John Travolta looking around confused even though Pulp Fiction is a Weinstein movie?

In the end, the joke is that they’re talking about all this while they quite literally living through the end of the world. Outside the window is some kind of massive disaster.

Ok, let’s get into the sketches, the heart of A Black Lady Sketch Show!

The Fog

This episode opens with a very quick, blink and you’ll miss it, sketch that’s little more than a simple nod to the perils of ashy skin.

Dennis runs through a forest trying to escape a slow moving fog. It’s straight up horror movie, could have been directed by Jordan Peele. She runs into Black who seems to think Dennis isn’t a good enough motivator to convince her to run from the fog.

Distracted by their little argument, they’re both overtaken by the fog.

Turns out “the fog” is just cocoa butter being used to fix some ashy skin. Crisis averted.

Motown Meltdown

Our four lead actresses are dressed up like an old school Motown quartet, standing behind a curtain ready to go out on stage. It’s clear that three of them get along really well, but the fourth (played by Thede) sees himself as the superstar and is about to take over their song.

Sure enough, Thede’s character gets out on stage and starts making their song about an innocent ice cream shop extremely sexual and then sexist.

The other three hilariously try to stop their counterpart, cover up what’s going on and keep the song going while the crowd grows more and more confused and uncomfortable.

As if this was a scene at the end of a Motown movie, text scrolls up the screen at the end, saying The Boppers never performed again.

Then there’s a final line saying that awful fourth member is the grandfather of Chris Brown.

Hertep Masterclass

Thede again shines in this sketch in the style of those masterclass ads that pop up on your computer telling you to learn some random skill from this world renowned pro. Well, this is a world renowned “philosophizer” who is telling black women to stay in the home and saying that black men are being frivolous with their…smiling.

Other highlights include a book titled “It’s not cheating, it’s fertilizing,” an impassioned speech about how, even if a black woman is yelling that she did a crime, she definitely didn’t do it and a riff on rejecting geometry because it’s just the white man trying to shape the world.

It’s a pretty funny riff on ridiculous conspiracy theories made up under the guise of empowerment and it makes a couple of different appearances in A Black Lady Sketch Show.

And yes, she rejects the term “master” in masterclass because of the slavery implications.

Bad B***h Support Group

Angela Bassett and Laverne Cox appear in this sketch about black women in a support group.

One, played by Dennis is starting to question whether she has to be a bad b— all the time and whether or not she can just be an “ok b—“ instead. Sometimes, she says, she wants to wear flat shoes.

Turns out, this support group is actually part of a study conducted by two people observing, unseen, from behind a mirror. This dissent is concerning because women rejecting impossible beauty standards could put them out of business.

Invisible Spy: Part 1

Kelly Rowland and Gina Torres pop up in this sketch starring Black as Trinity, a CIA spy who no one—including the people giving her an assignment—seems to notice. Apparently her “regular looking face” renders her invisible to people.

After getting her assignment (and being ignored and/or forgotten a couple more times), Trinity heads to break into a record label that’s doing some shady dealings. The security is tight, but she literally walks right by the security guard who looks right at her.

Or, really looks right through her. She moves on.

She gets to the office, but she’s stopped by a voice on the loud speakers. It’s the “invisible man” a bodyguard that the CIA has no information on because no one has seen him.

Turns out, he’s actually a black woman and she has Trinity spotted and caught with laser sensors.

Trinity proceeds to mission impossible the lasers (well, more dance through them) and get into the office, where she finds a woman who looks a lot like her. (Easily a commentary on how society completely disregards women, especially black women, who don’t fit into stereotypical beauty ideals in terms of look and body type.)

Of course, they fight and are evenly matched. Eventually, they stop fighting, and agree that the guy the mysterious bodyguard works for isn’t worth her time. So Trinity gets the hard drive she was there to take and the mysterious doppelgänger disappears.

Dance Biter

A Black Lady Sketch Show ends with a sketch of Brunson and Thede are in a lesbian dance club helping Thede’s character get over getting broken up with by her girlfriend over Venmo comments. The ex-girlfriend is there, so Thede decides to climb on a table and dance.

Meanwhile, Brunson is dancing and locks eyes with a women across the club who is mimicking Brunson’s dance moves exactly. It’s off-putting for Brunsen, but it gets really weird when the other woman just suddenly disappears.

Brunson runs after her and finds her in an alley.

Lights flicker and it goes completely to a horror vibe before the sketch cuts back inside the club to Thede climbing down from the table, apparently having won back her ex. She looks for Brunson, but instead sees the mysterious woman dancing just like Brunson.

Thede runs out to the alley and finds Brunson passed out.

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Just then, the mystery woman pops up again. Lights flicker.

We’re back in the club with Thede and Brunson who are determined to still have a good night, despite a mystery they don’t understand. But when they try to dance, they realize they’ve had all of their dance moves stolen.

Turns out, the mystery woman was an alien who was also determined to win back her girlfriend.

(Stick around after the credits for some outtakes.)

What did you think of this episode of A Black Lady Sketch Show? Let us know in the comments!

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