Photograph courtesy of Parkway School District/Parkway North High School
Given the sibling stand-up routine, you might compare Jason and Randy Sklar to the Smothers Brothers—minus the music and with a Bob Costas–like grasp of sports. Their act is a conversational game of ping-pong, in which the twins finish each other’s sentences and bounce jokes back and forth. After hosting Cheap Seats on ESPN Classic for years, the duo is currently doing a weekly podcast called Sklarbro Country about “the intersection of sports, comedy, and indie rock.”
Randy: We grew up in Creve Coeur—which I love because the real pronunciation is “Crev Curr,” but “Creev Corr” is such a St. Louis thing. We had a modest, two-story house, built in 1977. Our dad always used to say it was built so poorly that if we jumped too hard while playing Nerf hoops upstairs, we’d wind up in the kitchen.
[When we were kids], our father sold real estate. He would be showing houses and leave us outside in his giant Monte Carlo, with the car running and the Cardinals game on. I think that, more than anything, gave us this tremendous love of listening to games being called on the radio.
Especially when we started out [doing comedy], we were really identified with being from St. Louis. I think it’s really a part of us now. I’m constantly reminded of the fact that I didn’t grow up in L.A. or New York.
Jason: If you came from New York, you’d be like, “There’s nothing to do here.” But peel back the surface a little bit, and there were always cool things to do… Whenever we had friends visit, we’d always go to the Loop. We loved going to Vintage Vinyl and Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Tivoli...
Our dad was such a huge part of St. Louis for us because he had so much such civic pride. When he died, we had friends fly in for the funeral. The night after the funeral, everybody went to Ted Drewes. And the reason we did is because we knew that some people hadn’t been to St. Louis before, and on some level I knew that my dad would want them to love
St. Louis, even if they were coming for that. It’s such a deep connection to the city that he instilled in us. I’ll always feel that connection to the city, because it’s so intertwined with him.
