Like many young people, the members of Warm Summer Hotness bonded with each other over a mutual love of drinking and a mutual hatred of everything else. The sketch/improv comedy troupe will be taking to the Comedy Bar stage Nov. 2 as part of the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival, now in its sixth year.
Zanna Seipp Katz, one of five members of the troupe, which includes Seema Lakhani, Troy McFadyen, Niall O’Halloran and Laura Salvas, has wanted to perform since she was little and moved to Toronto in 2008 after finishing acting school in her hometown of Winnipeg.
“I ended up going to Second City when I first moved here. I had no friends, and I ended up making great friends with this group of people and ended up forming our group at the end of the year’s classes,” Seipp Katz, 26, says.
“We just loved each other and wanted to continue to meet on each week. So we wanted to make our own improv team, but our first gig that we got was a sketch show, so we ended up writing a sketch. Then everything we got booked for became sketch shows, so we became a sketch troupe, which I think I have more of a passion for because I prefer the scripted material.”
Seipp calls her comedy “smart comedy” – not going for the obvious joke so that the audience has to really listen to what is being said to get the joke. The group’s humour runs the gamut, touching on politics or sometimes just the hilarity of life itself.
“We all do the writing. Niall and Laura are our head writers, then we all tweak it, and then we work it to find out what works and what doesn’t work as a group. For SketchFest, we put together our best sketches. We have a good lineup, including four parodies based on the Cash Man [jeweller Russell Oliver]… and a haunted house sketch where there is flailing and killing, but it’s very comical,” she says.
Warm Summer Hotness has played various shows at the Rivoli and Comedy Bar. Last March, the group self-produced its first full-length show titled PROROGUED! They will be doing some sketches from it at SketchFest.
“We get our ideas sometimes from doing improv and seeing where that leads. If it leads to something funny then we write it as sketch. We also get ideas from life. Sometimes in a day something really weird happens, and that ends up on paper.”
Seipp Katz hopes one day to write a sketch based on Jewish characters and situations from her past. “We all have that one old Jewish aunt or that ridiculous Passover story.”
There are 40 North American acts performing at SketchFest, which takes place at the Lower Ossington Theatre, 100A Ossington Ave., and the Comedy Bar, 945 Bloor St. W. at Ossington.
Warm Summer Hotness performs at the Comedy Bar Stage, Nov. 2 at 10 p.m. Advance tickets are available online at www.totix.ca or in person at the T.O. Tix Booth at Yonge-Dundas Square. Day-of tickets are also available at all venue box offices.
