Yes, Jim Ousley knows: Sketch-comedy albums are a thing of the past. But that’s why the genre, he says, was perfect for him and his group Boys With Scarves when the pandemic hit.

“It really seemed to have reached its peak in the ’70s,” he says. “We’re always a bit out of step with time and fashion anyway, so we thought, ‘Hey, so no one listens to sketch-comedy records anymore? Why don’t we do a sketch-comedy record?'”

The group, including Ousley, Chris Anich, Oscar Madrid and Grant Essig, have known each other for decades. Three of them met in Magic Smoking Monkey Theater back in the 1990s, when they did late-night shows and “crazy comedy for sometimes sober crowds.”

They have stayed friends ever since. When the pandemic began, they started messaging in their group chat. “We missed each other,” Ousley says. They couldn’t perform in venues or go on stage, and they felt squirmy to make something.

“When you’re a creative type, you start to go even more stir-crazy because your inclination is to entertain people and make people happy,” he says.

Somewhere in that chat, the idea of a sketch-comedy album was floated. They were big fans of the genre. So they started texting each other ideas. The ideas turned into scripts, and the scripts piled up. They went to each…