The 21st annual comedy festival SF Sketchfest is back starting Thursday, featuring everything from a freshly crowned Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actor to a puppet dog that mostly just makes poop jokes.

As of last year, we are back to doing SF Sketchfest in person, and Thursday kicks off 16 days of the 21st SF Sketchfest Comedy Festival. This year's festival will feature a Porchlight show with our old friends Beth Lisick and Arlinne Klatt, with featured storytellers Paul Giamatti — who’s fresh off winning the Best Actor Critics' Choice Movie Award for The Holdovers — and Bob Odenkirk, who’s fresh off winning precisely zero Emmy Awards whatsoever for Better Call Saul, which was nominated 53 times.

The nonsense begins Thursday night with Eric Idle in Eric Idle but Jeff B. Davis. The former Monty Python member Idle recently claimed, “It may be the last show I ever do.” Is he just saying that to drive up ticket sales? Tune in Thursday to find out!

There are also four Kids in the Hall shows scheduled, and at this point, only one of them is sold out (though that performance will be available via streaming).

“It’s just a very great festival,” Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson tells the Bay Area News Group. “They take really good care of you, and there’s all kinds of comedy, improv, clown shows, standup. It’s probably the biggest, most diverse comedy [festival] I’ve ever been involved in. Comedians are so often on the road, and we have such itinerant lives. We’re all over the place, and these festivals are really good when you get to connect with people that you haven’t seen in a long time.”

A few standout movie parodies also highlight the schedule, including "Exorcistic" (Saturday, January 20 at Club Fugazi), "The Fast and the Furious: A Musical Parody" (Thursday, February 1 at the Great Star Theatre), and "The Real Housewives: The Unauthorized Musical Parody" (Sunday, February 4 at The Marsh).

A couple are of these shows will be available for streaming, including next Wednesday's sold-out Kids in the Hall show at the Great Star Theater, and this Sunday night’s Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s ‘Let’s Make a Poop’ at the Castro that will also feature “Weird Al" Yankovic.

SF Sketchfest runs Thursday, January 20 through Sunday, February 4. Schedule and tickets here.

Related: SF Sketchfest Returns In-Person Friday, Will Finally Celebrate Twice-Delayed 20th Anniversary [SFist]

Image: Tommy Lau via SF Sketchfest

Just two weeks after postponing Sketchfest 2022 indefinitely, the two-week comedy festival announced Friday morning that they’re not trying this again until next year, and waiting it out for 2023.

SFist did not want to be writing posts like this in 2022, but 14 days into the new year, here we are. The popular annual comedy show Sketchfest announced Friday morning that they’re canceling the 2022 edition of the festival, the Chronicle reports. This comes almost two weeks to the day after the event postponed Sketchfest 2022 indefinitely, and raises the specter that this will be yet another year of cancellations and postponements.

“SF Sketchfest has been rescheduled for Jan. 20 - Feb. 5, 2023!,” organizers said in a Friday morning tweet. “The vast majority of existing shows will still be presented at the festival. All ticket holders will be contacted directly as soon as possible with new dates, details and options.”

This is obviously an Omicron wave concern, but an additional organizer statement indicates that securing venues was also a difficult for a show that could not yet not commit to dates.

“Due to venue availability, 2023 is the earliest we can present the festival as planned, but we can’t wait to safely laugh along with you then,” SF Sketchfest co-founders David Owen, Cole Stratton, and Janet Varney said in an online update. “While we’re disappointed to spend another year apart, the health and safety of our audience, performers, and staff comes first.”

Last year would have been the 20th SF Sketchfest, and they kind of held it in the form of a one-night livestream. Now the 20th iteration of the event is effectively delayed another year. Moreover, we would already be a week into the originally planned 20th SF Sketchfest, and the event page is sadly displaying all the postponed events that would be in progress.

Related: Taylor Mac's 'Joy and Pandemic' Premiere Postponed at Magic Theatre [SFist]

Image: SF Sketchfest, Pat Mazzara via Facebook

SF Sketchfest, arguably the city's most anticipated and entertaining annual festival, promises to top last year's stellar selection of bladder squeezers. Most notably, Candice Bergen and Diane English will make a special appearance at the Castro Theatre on February 2 for "Tribute to Murphy Brown," part of SF Sketchfest's Great Collaborators Series.

Murphy Brown received sixty-two Emmy nominations, eighteen Emmy Awards (including two for Best Comedy Series), a Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series, and the George Foster Peabody Award for Significant and Meritorious Achievement. It was also a staple of the '90s and Monday night TV on CBS. The show used political humor and, most infamously, single motherhood to effectively flush the 1980s down the toilet.

In addition to Murphy Brown, the festival, which will run from Jan. 13 - Feb. 5, will feature such talent as Dan Aykroyd, James L. Brooks, David Byrne, Neil Patrick Harris, Cloris Leachman & Peaches Christ (yes!), Moby, Gary Shandling, Celebrity Autobiography, Upright Citizens Brigade, and more.

Check out SF Sketchfest's 2001 lineup.

Slated to appear at tonight's SF Sketchfest Tribute to Conan O'Brien, the ginger talkshow host has postponed his SF gig:

SF Sketchfest's a href="http://www.sfsketchfest.com/schedule/">breaks the bad news:

Due to the uncertainty surrounding the future of The Tonight Show, Conan O'Brien will have to postpone his appearance. Ticketholders are advised to keep their tickets and will be notified when the event has been rescheduled.

If you recall, Jay Leno, a horrible human being, failed to to grab viewers' attention with his painful foray into prime time TV. So, after promising the far superior O'Brien The Tonight Show, which he hosted for a few months, Leno took part in rescinding the offer because, inexplicably, he wants to remain on TV. And because he's an talent-free fleck of dried-up fecal matter.

SFist will update you if/when the show is rescheduled.

It was standing room only at the Mezzanine, and the place was already packed to the gills when we arrived fifteen minutes before the show. This made us a little bummed -- standing for several hours staring at a bunch of rock bands can be exhausting enough, but luckily, we got to sit on the edge of a couch upstairs and hunch down to watch all the acts below the railing. At one point, two of the geeks (Sam Weir and an uber-hip Bill Haverchuck) from Freaks and Geeks sat in front of us with their female entourage. Update: We were just told that freak Lindsey Weir was also hanging out with the geeks -- we're not sure why we didn't recognize her.

All the acts were fabulous, but since there was such a huge line-up, each one only seemed to last about ten minutes. Even Jon Benjamin and Eugene Mirman took note of the weird nightclub set-up. "It's going to be a looong night," noted Jon Benjamin. "Thanks for standing," quipped Eugene Mirman at one point. We think the event would have been much better had it spread out over two nights or something.

Photo of Tim and Eric by Jakub Mosur

More details after the jump!