The Brothers Sklar

ot of comedy falls under great scrutiny and derision, often unnecessarily so. Impressions, props, magic, duos — anything slightly out of the ordinary seems to open itself up to criticism. Yes, there are bad impressionists, but there’s also Frank Caliendo, Mike MacRae and James Adomian. There are bad prop comics, but then there’s Carrot Top, who knows what time it is but still owns it. Comedy and magic don’t mix for a lot of people, but then there’s Penn & Teller, who are also a duo.

Fortunately, the Sklar Brothers, who headline local comedy and beer fest Cincy Brew Ha-Ha Friday night, have avoided such slings and arrows by developing a truly organic stand-up act. Of course, it helps that, as twins, they’ve been in and out of each other’s pockets since birth.

“We’ve thought about doing stuff separately,” says Jason Sklar. “And we have done stuff separately, but I think we quickly understood this is a cool and unique thing. There aren’t a lot of twins in comedy and we thought if we do it well, we will stand out among other comedians and among other teams. If we stopped doing this and went and did our own things, we would know how to be on stage and how to write jokes and do material, but we’d be starting over in a lot of ways. We’ve spent 25 years working on our team, and it would be a shame to leave it.”

“It’s nice, too,” adds Randy Sklar. “Because we can talk about things from our childhood and everybody’s on board, and they believe it. As we become parents and our kids get older, we’ll look at that dynamic and at our individual families and then go back and revisit what we do on stage.”

On the subject of teams, the Sklar Brothers are widely known for doing a lot of sports-related comedy, most notably from their ESPN Classics series Cheap Seats, as well as their duties guest-hosting for sports radio talk show host Jim Rome.

“We had Rome on our podcast Sklarbro Country for a full hour,” says Jason. “Which is…”

“Something he doesn’t normally do,” says Randy, seamlessly finishing his brother’s sentence.

“He doesn’t do a lot of long interviews,” Jason continues. “We knew him, but we weren’t Rome ‘clone’ insiders. This guy created a whole language for his fan base. There’s a glossary of terms only they know. We were inspired to create our podcast based on the fact that we filled in for him occasionally.”

Thank social media for that.

“As Twitter started to take off, people would tweet, ‘I wish you were subbing for Rome,’ ” Jason says. “We even have our own subset of fans called Sklones, which is the greatest.”

Rome stumbled onto the Sklars sort of by accident.

“He was a huge fan of our show Cheap Seats,” Randy says, “which we didn’t know about until we interviewed him.”

It turns out the producer of Cheap Seats was a friend of the producer of Rome’s TV show Jim Rome is Burning.

“They said to us, ‘We’re doing this new show with Jim Rome where we want to have comedians, writers and athletes be part of a forum.’ So we met with them and thought it sounded great but that it would never happen. Nothing in TV ever happens the way you think it’s going to happen.”

The show did end up moving forward, of course, and Randy appeared on the panel. That’s when he met Travis Rodgers, the producer of Rome’s radio show, who then approached the Sklars about subbing while Rome was on vacation, or “in the basement,” as the host likes to put it.

“We didn’t fully understand what we were stepping into, but we prepped for it and had great show,” Randy says. “I’m kind of glad we didn’t know the full story, because it would have been very intimidating. We just went in and Jim really liked it because it was different from what he was doing.”

The Sklars, who grew up in St. Louis, have a connection to Cincinnati. “Our mom grew up in Canton, Ohio, and our dad, who is no longer with us, grew up in St. Louis, and they met in Cincinnati,” Jason says. “So the city holds a very special place in the history of our family. We’ve been back a couple of times and just loved it when we were there.”

“Cincinnati and St. Louis are very similar cities,” adds Randy. “Both on the river, both blue collar.”

Growing up, the brothers were interested in sports and comedy. “Yeah, both pretty equally,” Randy says. “Sports when we were really young and then comedy as we started to develop more as people. When we were 10 or 11 years old, we were huge fans of Jerry Seinfeld, even before he had his show. We would go around telling people about Seinfeld, and we couldn’t believe we had to beat the drum for this guy. We thought ‘Nobody’s ever going to know who this guy is.’ ”

“And we were right,” Jason jokes. “No one knew who he was after the mid-’80s. Nothing happened for him after that.”

The brothers also watched Bill Cosby’s Himself, Saturday Night Live and movies like Airplane! and Blazing Saddles. “We realized it’s fun to make people laugh,” Randy says.

At the time they were absorbing all of those comedic influences, St. Louis was enjoying a lot of success in the world of sports. The Cardinals were in the World Series several times, the Blues consistently made the NHL playoffs and even the indoor soccer Steamers were drawing well.

“We were really into the local sports teams,” Randy says, “and we took that nerdy lens about knowing everything about the comedians we loved and applied that to the world of sports. I could tell you right now, 10 members of the St. Louis Steamers indoor soccer team.”

THE SKLAR BROTHERS headline Cincy Brew Ha-Ha Friday. The fest runs Thursday (headliner Josh Sneed) through Saturday (headliner David Alan Grier) at Sawyer Point. More info: cincybrewhaha.com.