During the long-running SF Sketchfest, San Francisco becomes more than a backdrop—it becomes a gathering place. For two weeks, the city reorganizes itself around live comedy, music, and conversation, filling theaters and clubs with performers trying things in real time, without the safety net of editing or distance. It’s part comedy festival, part reunion, and part reckoning.
That atmosphere makes room for unlikely intersections. This year, “Reno 911!” co-creator Thomas Lennon; “Fresh Off the Boat” and Marvel star Randall Park; and “Full House” and “Fuller House” actor Jodie Sweetin arrive at SF Sketchfest 2026 from very different points in their lives and careers—each carrying a long arc that briefly converges in San Francisco.
Thomas Lennon Returns to SF Sketchfest—with The Smiths
Lennon has been coming to SF Sketchfest for so long that he talks about it less like a booking and more like a ritual. It’s where he sees the people who made him, the collaborators who still feel like extended family, and the comedy community that keeps showing up even as careers scatter outward.
“SF Sketchfest is a tradition in both our family and our extended family of [‘90s MTV sketch-comedy troupe] The State,’” he says.
Over the years, that’s meant full-blown reunions, commemorative episodes, staged readings of unproduced material, even an elaborate performance built entirely around Yelp reviews of an infamous LA Koreatown gym—delivered as if they were war letters in a Ken Burns documentary.
“As soon as SF Sketchfest says, ‘Can you do something,’ the next thought is, ‘Oh God, we have to go’—because it’s the best festival of the year,” says Lennon.
This year, Lennon’s excuse to return looks different. Instead of sketch or scripted comedy, he’s bringing a lifelong obsession with him—one that’s been quietly threading through his career for almost two decades.
At the Great American Music Hall, Lennon will host and perform with the Sweet and Tender Hooligans (Fri/23), a note-perfect Smiths and Morrissey tribute band he’s been playing with on and off since around 2009.
“I’ve been an adjunct member of the band,” he says. “I’m the rhythm guitarist—the one they could turn down if they wanted and just keep me there for my incredible presence.”
It’s a joke, but only partly. Lennon practices. He studies the parts. He talks about Johnny Marr’s guitar lines with the seriousness of someone discussing sacred texts.
The idea, he explains, was simple: let the music remain exacting and sincere, then frame it through an SF Sketchfest lens. “It’ll be a real Sweet and Tender Hooligans show,” says Lennon, “but also with my take on Morrissey. You won’t have to guess why it’s at SF Sketchfest. It’ll make sense as soon as it starts.”
That balance—devotion without irony, humor without mockery—is key to Lennon’s relationship with The Smiths. What outsiders often hear as sadness, he hears as something sharper.
“The Smiths aren’t for sad people,” he says. “They’re for angry people.”
He describes his fandom not as taste but as belief. “It’s more like a religion for me,” adds Lennon.
He still remembers exactly when it began: a summer night in Oak Park, IL, “Reel Around the Fountain” playing in the background, and the immediate conviction that it was the best song he’d ever heard. “I still think that,” he says, decades later.
Randall Park’s First SF Sketchfest Appearance Comes as a Tribute
Across the festival schedule, Randall Park is coming to SF Sketchfest with a very different posture. This will be his first time appearing at the festival, but not his first relationship with the city.
Park is being honored with a tribute conversation at Great Star Theater (Sat/24), something he admits still feels strange to accept.
“I don’t really understand it,” says Park. “I don’t feel like an icon or a legend. I still feel like a working actor.”
When comedic actor and friend Janet Varney reached out about the tribute, Park initially pushed back. “I didn’t think I was worthy of it at this stage,” he says.
What changed his mind wasn’t ego but trust: in Varney, in the city, and in the idea that sometimes recognition arrives before you feel ready for it.
That sense of always being mid-journey has defined Park’s career. Long before TV series “Fresh Off the Boat,” before Jimmy Woo became a Marvel fan favorite with the Ant-Man franchise, before writing and starring in Always Be My Maybe or directing Shortcomings, Park was piecing things together however he could—often while working service jobs.
“I worked at two Starbucks,” says Park, one in Santa Monica, another in Pacific Palisades. At the same time, he was appearing on an MTV improv show, “Nick Cannon Presents: Wild ‘N Out.” “It was humbling to be on TV and make very little money,” he says.
Asked when he first felt like he’d “made it,” Park doesn’t name a show or a premiere. He names an apartment. “When I could afford a one-bedroom in LA’s Mar Vista neighborhood,” he says. “That was huge.”
What Park talks about most, though, isn’t finances or credits—it’s the mental work of staying on his own path. “Comparison was the biggest challenge,” says the actor. “Rejection is constant in this business, and I had to unlearn a lot of things.”
The shift came when he stopped measuring himself against other people’s timelines and focused instead on what was directly in front of him. “That’s what kept me creative,” he says. “That’s what helped me start creating my own opportunities.”
San Francisco, for Park, isn’t just another tour stop. It’s personal. His father first immigrated to the U.S. through the city, working as a busboy at a restaurant that is now long gone.
“His favorite song was ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco,’” says Park. “He played it all the time.” That history turned the city into something inherited—visited with family as a kid, revisited with friends during college, returned to again and again as his career took shape.
“The root of it is my dad’s immigrant journey,” he says.
Jodie Sweetin Brings ‘Smoke Show’ and Creative Control to SF Sketchfest
Jodie Sweetin’s return to SF Sketchfest comes powered by something she built herself. Smoke Show with Sweetin (Sat/24, BATS Improv Theatre)—a “comedy pageant” that’s part game night, part spectacle—started not as a festival pitch but as a monthly experiment in LA. She co-created it with friends, sisters Sabrina and Gia Cognata, longtime collaborators who wanted to make something unpredictable and collaborative.
“Our tagline is ‘Looks don’t matter, being funny does,’” says Sweetin.
The format takes comedians and runs them through absurd pageant-style challenges—talent segments turned upside down, games designed to derail, and ceremonies that veer gleefully off-script.
“It’s ridiculous and inappropriate and wild,” she says. “And people keep coming back.”
The spark came from old photos. Sweetin had just been at her mother’s house, where albums from the mid-’80s—actual childhood pageant pictures—resurfaced.
“I had them on my desk,” says the actor, “and my friends were like, ‘Wait—a pageant?’ And that was it.”
They began running the show monthly in early 2025, writing new material each time, building an audience the slow way. “We put a lot into it,” Sweetin says. “And SF Sketchfest was one of our goals. We wanted to get it to a point where it could travel.”
Sweetin has been to SF Sketchfest before with a podcast, and she’s drawn to the same thing Lennon describes: the compressed energy of a festival where everyone is presenting something live—unfinished in the best way.
“It feels like a two-week sprint,” she says. “You’re putting your thing in front of people who haven’t seen it before.” For Sweetin, that act of authorship matters. Much of her adult career has been about reclaiming control over what she creates—and how she’s seen.
“Doing stand-up and writing these shows has been huge for me,” says the comedian, who over the years has overcome substance misuse, penned a memoir about her recovery journey (2009’s unSweetined), and is a staunch anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia advocate. “People start realizing I’m more Bob Saget than Stephanie Tanner.”
Producing, podcasting (“How Rude, Tanneritos!” alongside “Full House” castmate Andrea Barber), building live comedy—it’s all part of proving, mostly to herself, that she knows what she’s doing now.
“I love ‘How Rude,’” she says, referencing her famous “Full House” tagline. “But it’s been nice to show there’s more.”
Her relationship with San Francisco is layered with memory, too. “Full House” made the city iconic to millions, but Sweetin’s connection is also personal: childhood trips, close friends who live there now, and work visits for Netflix’s “Fuller House” that blurred into reunions. She’s staying extra days this time, she says, to see people and enjoy the city without rushing.
For more than two weeks, SF Sketchfest 2026 turns San Francisco into a city of shared rooms—places where devotion, doubt, reinvention, and joy can coexist live onstage. With Thomas Lennon, Randall Park, and Jodie Sweetin each bringing something deeply personal to the festival, SF Sketchfest once again proves why San Francisco remains one of the most vital comedy cities in the country.
SF SKETCHFEST runs through February 1. Tickets and more info here.
