It is Wednesday night, September 3, and you have just arrived at the Pack Theater in Los Feliz. It is dangerously close to 9:00 PM. You lock your car and take long strides across the parking lot to meet up with a crowd of people waiting to go in.
Once inside, the path splits to show two, side-by-side theaters drawing Eastside moths to the flaming rhetoric of all for laughs. The Clubhouse and the Pack share a front door, so you file alongside a prospective audience about to be guillotined in half.
Every first Wednesday at 9:00 PM the Pack serves you twice: two house sketch teams, in no particular order — Ugly Cry and Good Sandwich. Their names suggest something other than what they are: a palette of writers and performers who stage a double feature of myriad scenes for your entertainment. You yourself entertain this idea and pay the $9 to see it done.
You walk in and are immediately baffled as to where to sit. Towards the back is the wide angle lens. Up front you can watch the idiosyncratic movements of each performer’s eyes. You ask yourself how close you want to be; how far are the artists on stage from your lurid Los Angeles life?
In respect to Good Sandwich, not very far. If you’re here in the first place, chances are you know one of them: Jack Boston, Aine Geraghty, Greg St. Greg, Mackenzie Horras, Samantha Manning, Charlotte Morrissey, Ronny Pascale, Eric Phillips, Alex Ramirez, Anika Ramlo, Corey Taft and Kaley Vetter.
Their act begins with the game show “Are You Sure You Locked Your Car?” You chuckle at the premise, then shift in your seat. You did lock your car, didn’t you?
St. Greg plays the host, a rambunctious sport with a menacing edge. En suite are three contestants played by Horras, Ramlo, and Vetter, each getting quizzed with the eponymous question, “Are you sure you locked your car?” until only one remains. When Horras’s character is the last one standing, they award her a… cargoyle.
A what? A cargoyle. A figurine is presented to Horras, whose stress-sweat lubricates the talisman to animate a living breathing cargoyle, played by Geraghty. It’s at this point that St. Greg shouts at Horras to kill it, which she does, strangling the poor, demonic creature, who, at the final moment, Horras reveals is pregnant. Or was.
Taft, the writer of the sketch, is fond of irreverent, dark humor. Before joining the team, he didn’t think very highly of his craft.
“Oh, that’s just me being weird and silly,” he’d say in apologetic tones. But the other members of Good Sandwich reassured him that his comedy wasn’t lost on them. Their talents were not lost on him, either.
“We’re very eclectic,” Taft admitted to you one evening. “It feels like a cathartic club or community.”
Certainly that’s what it looked like walking midway into a rehearsal for their September show. Just like an adult might feel watching children running amok during a playdate, so did you watching from afar the beauty of their fooling.
The Pack’s newest house teams were all assembled from a pool of submissions and auditions in October 2025. They came together for their debut stage appearance in November where they sang shanties as pirates, then crafted their first show in December and kept the laughs going every month since.
For the better part of this year, Good Sandwich has staged rehearsals in Ramlo’s backyard, where atop a modest slab of splintering red wood and below a canopy of string lights and spiderwebs, the team turns into a bona fide troupe.
Before you could stammer out a hello from the gate, they had set the scene for their next sketch, called “Therapy Session,” which now rolls out its final form on the Pack stage.
Manning plays a the-rapist with a dirty mind. Geraghty appears as an unhinged patient who hears the voice of Mater from the Pixar animated movie Cars goading her to commit misanthropic acts. Ramirez voices Mater with an irrepressible twang that drives Geraghty’s character to unravel, which Manning’s therapist takes as an opportunity to lure out “romantic mommy kink feelings” from the patient. Uh-oh.
The two members on stage came to Good Sandwich from different beats. Geraghty opened up to you that she emerged from “the darkest, lowest moment of [her] life” and thought, “I don’t know if I can be funny anymore.” Manning on the other hand said she saw a friend join the Pack and thought, “I like to play pretend.”
Each brings a corpus of comedic instinct stemming from childhood. Manning inherited her “dry, sarcastic, funny characters” as a family heirloom, whereas Geraghty was nursed on “the cartoonish, ridiculous, outlandish nature of the comedy” she grew up watching on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. Both agree working with other writers and performers over time hones a confidence, if not a practice; external pressure from putting on a show every month marries with encouraged audacity to put forth weird, unfiltered ideas.
“I want us to do a sketch with a limbo,” Geraghty blurted out in one pitch meeting. “I have no idea what it would be but I thought it would be funny if we got a limbo bar and brought it on stage and did something that involved limbo.”
And there, in that pause when many of us listening might scratch our heads, the other members did their part to make what she said something to laugh about.
“Everyone’s trying really hard to punch up each other’s ideas,” affirmed Ramirez, the writer of “Therapy Session.” “And I don’t feel like anyone is trying to shoot down anyone’s pitch.”
Morrissey, another writer on the team, welcomes possibilities that emerge in accepting the simplest of parameters. Their May show opened with a sketch Phillips wrote, called “Free Solo,” where climbers risk their lives for a free Rolo at the top of Half Dome. To Morrissey, it was astounding. “What is the idea you have here? That words rhyme?” Nevertheless, the performers carried out and heightened the sketch to a level that got the crowd going.
“We have the freedom to explore and create in our own voices,” Geraghty echoed. “The thing about the Pack that’s really nice is if you can write it and you can perform it and it’s funny, f**king do it.”
All of a sudden, the audience erupts in applause. You’re back in the house and there are new shapes on the stage. As quick as one world deflates, another one balloons.
Quite quick in fact, as the driving principle for “Speed Dating” is the tempo of Vetter’s character. She rockets into a seat opposite Manning then speaks and acts with churning velocity, fast-forwarding this first encounter toward the ultimate love affair, characters appearing and vanishing as the couple passes through marriage, children, and death.
“Time’s up! Wow! Fastest speed dater ever!” Ramlo announces to the audience, sticking a ribbon to Vetter’s expired body.
In rehearsal, Lilah Taber, the team’s director, gave notes about blocking while Pascale, a writer and the group’s de facto stage technician, edited the show credits on his computer. “Speed Dating” was in Vetter’s packet when she auditioned.
“Originally it was just me talking really fast the whole time, then [the others] pitched on going fast through a whole relationship, which I hadn’t thought of at all,” she explained to you in an interview. “Sketches are not possible for one person to do by themselves.”
Next you see the scene open on Manning as a reporter interviewing two witnesses of a carjacking accident. St. Greg and Ramlo play “twins who have lived alone together for the past 35 years,” and speak almost exclusively in unison. Despite the topic at hand, they go into tireless detail about the minutiae of their lives, including the only type of milk they drink (it’s iguana), the signature “slurp and slip” move they coined for slurping cereal and slipping outside, their late cat Turd the Third, the Third Turd, and living cat Paco, whom Ramlo’s character communes with using voodoo magic in a plot to absorb her twin and carry on life as one.
“I’m not very subtle,” St. Greg, the writer of “Twinsies,” confessed to you after a rehearsal. “I tend to gravitate towards absurdism or super exaggerated concepts.” When it came time to ditch his surname Szydlowski for a stage name, he thought “what’s something dumb?,” chose Greg St. Greg, and never looked back.
Ramlo pairs well with St. Greg’s sense of humor, praising his work as “so stupid” while shaking her head in admiration. The team throws around this word like you’ve never heard it before. “Stupid” is aspirational, and through a shared taste for the absurd, the team gets better at smuggling comedic genius under the guise of what is seemingly moronic.
“Bachelorette in Space,” written by Boston, follows with a twist on another classic. The vapid and flighty bachelorette played by Vetter tosses around two equally dense bachelors played by St. Greg and Ramirez. Rejected suitors are expelled from a spacecraft by the push of a button, which Vetter stretches out for full comedic effect. In rehearsal when someone asked about what sound effects would be used for that, Taber’s eyes circled back to Pascale, who you could see was playing games on his phone. Watching live however, the cue is dead-on.
“Shower,” the show’s closer, is a Ramlo original. During rehearsal, a boho shower curtain was wheeled out on the stage and there was much debate about how to position it. Ramlo stood on a stool behind the curtain, which revealed her from the collar up for most of the scene.
While Taber gave notes, Geraghty made her rounds with Speckles, a tiny owl finger puppet. Ramlo experimented with different strings of expletives as she wiped out in the shower time and time again. Vetter tried to pick up mosquito repellent from the ground with a sticky feet toy and hit you in the mouth. No, no, none of this is all that silly.
Before you know it, Ramirez buttons up the show with “She’s so dramatic” as Ramlo is slain by Vetter with a chainsaw. A projector casts the end credits onto the screen. The whole Good Sandwich team comes out to bow. The lights in the house go up and the whiplash return of Wednesday night hits you as if you hadn’t watched not only this show but their rehearsals too, and all the shows before.
Outside the Pack, you stir awkwardly in wait for them. Time goes by slowly, in a masochistic way. Tongue-tied and cheeky, you greet the members of Good Sandwich as they do at last appear. They invite you to a nearby diner for a post-show debrief. You agree and walk with them up Vermont in a stream of consciousness that just lets it all slide.
Fred 62 opens up a gate on Russell Avenue for the team and its entourage. You all sit down, Last Supper style, at a long table made of many shorter tables. This is it: you’ve joined them on the other side of their ruse, the brazen crew afloat like pirates over the sea of late night Los Angeles.
You look around to see what everyone’s eating: scrambled curly tenders, or vegan falafel pancakes. Grilled coffee fries? A red onion lager? You mix up what’s what, but nowhere on the table is there a sandwich of any sort. You nod — one good sandwich is enough.
Good Sandwich’s next sketch show at the Pack Theater will be November 4 at 9:00 PM, with another show every first Wednesday of the month.
Joe Gutesha is a writer and poet based in Los Angeles. He is the author of two plays and an unpublished novella. His work is featured in New York Magazine, The Bangalore Review, and Jlaudio’s Extraordinary Café. These days he burns the midnight oil writing his first novel about the origin of passionfruit.