1812, figuring out what's funny in 2010

News is a funny thing. Ask executives at Comedy Central about

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

or

The Colbert Report

. Call IFC and discuss why it's bringing faux news hawks from the Onion to its cable channel in January. Start a discussion about

Saturday Night Live

's "Weekend Update" - the only consistently humorous element of the long-running NBC show.

Or ask Jennifer Childs, artistic director of 1812 Productions, Philly's comedy theater organization.

Starting Thursday, Childs, her troupe of local comic thespians, and writer Don Montrey will launch the fifth iteration of their annual political sketch and news-desk revue, This Is the Week That Is.

That is, as soon as they figure what Is is.

A few days before Thanksgiving, a week or so away from the show's first preview performance at Plays & Players Theatre, the crew - Childs, her actor-husband Scott Greer, Susan Riley Stevens, Steven Wright, Thomas E. Shotkin, "roving reporter" Dave Jadico, keyboardist Alex Bechtel, and "anchorman" Tony Braithwaite - are still trying to figure out the show's local focus.

At a large table laden with cinnamon rolls and soda cans at 1812's rehearsal studios on North Seventh Street, they sugar-rush their way through costumed bits (Greer leads a hearty group rendition of "Happy Days Are Here Again") and news briefs about the complexity of President Obama's conversational rhetoric while considering what Philadelphia chatter is essential to their revue.

On this day, they're stumped. "We like to keep a balance between national and local," Childs says. "The scales tip depending on what's going on. A few years ago, when gun violence in Philly was at an all-time high, we did extensive material about that. The year of the election, 2008, there was relatively little about local politics because the big story was national.

"We find that whatever's pointed and written well gets the most laughs - doesn't matter local or national."

This year, in their estimation, was a "fluff" year in terms of Philadelphia.

As conversation turns to their take on the end of one congressional session and the beginning of another, more- Republican one (the whole lame-duck shebang will become a Grease-like musical number with yearbook memories as a motif), Jadico finds something locally pertinent to crow about: the troubles at the new SugarHouse Casino involving random acts of robbery and violence.

"With the political and humorous nature of the show, we can comment and respond on what's going on in our world, positively and negatively, and connect as a community while doing it," says Jadico, a 16-year veteran of the ComedySportz improv show, as well as an active 1812 member who has been in all four past This Is the Weeks. "There's nothing more civically therapeutic as laughing with one another."

Low-level anxiety will fill what Childs says is TITWTI's overall theme for 2010: Things are bad, but they've been lousier. She's mum about the tragicomedies 1812 will plumb in its sketches, though Bechtel slips and mentions a '70s blaxploitation musical number.

By rehearsal's end, the team has decided to interview a SugarHouse winner, with all silly manner of looting going on in the background. This is the "cocktail napkin" stage, when the script exists as hastily scribbled notes from all its participants. Childs plays traffic cop, with head writer Montrey her second-in-command.

"Our writing sessions are all about talking - what's going on, how we feel, what we want to say about it," says Montrey, a stand-up comedian and Bad Hair sketch group member who first collaborated with 1812 years ago on a short film called "This Is a Break Up."

For him, working on TITWTI is comedic paradise. "I get to write jokes on a daily basis for a show that goes up that night - the closest I'll probably get to writing for a Letterman or a Conan."

After Braithwaite makes puns about subject matter and every member brings bits to the table, Childs and Montrey settle down to do the heavy lifting of the script.

Act 1 is filled with evergreens, multimedia sketches, and musical numbers that will stay for the length of the run (save for a few verses of the opening number that change nightly). Act 2, where Montrey carries the weight, is the news-desk stuff, the timely material that differs from night to night, week to week.

The troupe began its seasonal revues in 2000.

"Ten years ago we made The Big Time: Vaudeville for the Holidays that began my fascination with comedic history," Childs recalls. Then came a series of docu-comedies focusing on an era or area of that history - Like Crazy Like Wow (1950s nightclub comedy), Something Wonderful Right Away (the history of improv), Always a Lady (women in comedy), and Double Down (male double acts).

The first TITWTI, in 2006, was a look at the history of political humor. "That was intriguing to me - not only how we made our political satire but how other comedians had been doing so for ages," Childs says. "When we got into the process, the part of it that was so wildly exciting was finding our own way of commenting on what was going on in the world."

It became a way for 1812 to speak with a collective voice about provocative or troubling issues while still making people laugh. Now the holiday tradition is a conflation of The Carol Burnett Show and The Daily Show, with Childs the former and Montrey the latter.

With the popularity of Stewart and Colbert, and the hilarious yet chilling reign of the 24-hour news cycle and opinion-making prowess of MSNBC and Fox, is there room for 1812 to become power-mad?

"We're not trying to persuade or inform - we're reacting," Montrey claims. "We have a point of view, not an agenda. Sometimes that POV pisses people off, but that's OK. If we hit a nerve, it means our joke had teeth."

Childs thinks the power of faux news shows, hers included, has to do with where the country is.

"When we started, W. was president and people were angry. Anger is funny. During the '08 election, people were still angry, but there was this growing sense of hope and Sarah Palin - and that was funny. Last year people were disappointed. Disappointment's not funny. Audiences came, laughed, and the show was incredible, but it was a harder road to get there. People were not sure whether they were ready to laugh at Obama.

"In 2010, people are angry again, some because everything has changed and some because nothing has changed. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out."