Being an Upright Citizens Brigade intern for nearly two years means I’ve seen a lot of wild sketch shows that live rent-free in my mind. One that really stuck with me for years was Fucking Identical Twins. The musical sketch show from the minds of Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson was about two twin brothers who were separated at birth and found themselves in the midst of their companies merging together. When I first heard of Dicks: The Musical, I thought, “Could it be? Could this be my Fucking Identical Twins?” and lo and behold, my dreams came true.
Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp wrote a witty comedy about Craig (Sharp) and Trevor (Jackson) as they meet at work, the show that was birthed in the grimy basement of UCB Chelsea. Two of the top salesmen, they compete against each other for the top spot as the two straight alpha men in charge to win the praise of their boss Gloria (Megan Thee Stallion). Despite constantly being told within those first moments of meeting each other that they look identical, they ignore it before realizing in a beautiful number that they are “f***ing identical twins” (hence the previous title of the sketch show).
Turning from alpha males trying to compete with each other into its own warped version of The Parent Trap, Dicks: The Musical weaves a story that kids of divorce everywhere can understand: that half-baked hope that your parents can still figure it out no matter what age you are—even if they did separate you at birth and you just discovered that you had a twin brother after all of these years.
Where the A24 version shines is in the ability for Sharp and Jackson to explore Trevor and Craig in a more grounded way by filling out the cast with comedy legends and bringing new songs (with music by Karl Saint Lucy and Marius de Vries).
From a Chelsea basement to a hilarious movie adventure
This is one of those sketch shows-to-movie adaptations that feels like a fever dream for someone like me, who watched this while fighting the Gristedes above the theater for some ice before my shift started. This show used to have both Jackson and Sharp playing their own parents, and a clip at the end of the film shows Jackson as their mother, Evelyn, in old lady makeup. The joy of the A24 movie is that it gives them the means (and the budget) to get legends like Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally to take on their quirky parents.
Evelyn (Mullally) is a woman whose vagina fell off, who carries it around with her and loves her collection of trinkets around her home. She kept Trevor in her divorce, so when Craig and Trevor decide to switch places, Craig wears a wig and goes to see his mother and learns a bit too much about her too quickly—like the fact that her vagina just fell off. But he does get to see who raised his brother, a role formerly played by Jackson. Lane plays Harris, who raised Craig and left because he discovered that he is a gay man and also because of his sewer boys. I’ll let you discover the sewer boys for yourself because they are very important to me.
It’s just a fun time in the theaters and is a showcase of that era of UCB comedy that felt lost to the sands of time for a brief while. I’m grateful that a movie like this exists, and seeing Dicks: The Musical get celebrated by a company like A24 gives me hope for the future of comedy.
Dicks: The Musical is most definitely worth seeing it in theaters. Do it for the sewer boys.
(featured image: A24)
