Jane Wickline ’21 Finds Community in Comedy

In the five years since graduation, Jane Wickline ’21 has achieved the dream of many entertainers: joining the cast of Saturday Night Live.

During her time on campus, Wickline majored in creative writing with a minor in politics and was editor-in-chief of the famously droll alternative student newspaper The Grape. Music figured into her time at Oberlin, too: Before she played her charmingly off-kilter, deeply Gen Z-coded songs live on SNL’s Weekend Update, Wickline played in student bands and honed her skills on jazz trumpet. 

Wickline returned to Oberlin in March to perform her musical sketch comedy show Dukes at Finney Chapel with her friend and collaborator Liva Pierce. The show was cosponsored by Oberlin’s student sketch comedy group Good Talk—fitting, since Wickline was also head cowriter of the troupe. “It’s really exciting to see that they’re still going so strong,” she says. “I love watching their sketches on YouTube. It seems like it’s in great hands.”

A few hours before her first-ever post-grad performance on campus, Wickline—who enjoyed a sold-out off-Broadway run with Dukes over the summer and was recently promoted to repertory player status on SNL—talked about Oberlin’s longstanding sketch and stand-up comedy scene and how her Obie friends have shaped her comedic style. 

“Being back here, it’s really amazing to see how vibrant the campus is and has remained and how many of the things that I did and got to experience there are still going so strong,” Wickline says. “It’s such a fun campus. I was never bored for a second.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sloane DiBari: Did Oberlin have a notable influence on your comedy?
Jane Wickline: Definitely. I think Oberlin is a big part of the reason I ended up deciding [comedy] was what I wanted to pursue. So many of my friends from Good Talk and from the Grape are either comedians or are doing comedy-adjacent things now. [It’s] really special to still have that strong community of Oberlin people. For a smallish school, it is amazing how big the comedy community is there. 

It’s pretty wonderful. So my favorite sketch of yours on Saturday Night Live, or one of them anyway—that and the mismatched couple with Marcello Hernández—is the one on Weekend Update where you’re Sabrina Carpenter. What kinds of musical experiences did you have at Oberlin, and how have they shaped you as a comedy performer?
It’s interesting; I didn’t do musical comedy of basically any kind until way after I graduated, but I definitely would not have fallen into that if not for all of the time I spent in bands. For a long time, I was between comedy and music, and it was only about a year before I started SNL that Liva and I started this show together and started writing songs together. It is still something that both of us are figuring out as we go, but it’s a lot of fun. 

I missed it so much when I left Oberlin and started going hard on the comedy stuff and going to open mics. For a long time, I really missed playing in bands and playing music with friends. [Dukes] has been a really nice way to get back into that.

Speaking of musical comedy and Dukes: How did you and Liva meet and start working together?
We moved to Brooklyn around the same time and were both going to open mics every night and [were] on the same circuit. So we ran into each other all the time. We had some mutual friends and would see each other perform.

We became friends pretty quickly and decided to try just doing, like, one night of a sketch show. It was so much fun, and [we] continued [doing the show]. Increasingly, then, we were like, “OK, this is really going to be a priority for both of us.” And then we started working with Mabel Lewis and Henry Hornbuckle, who are codirectors. It’s really nice because on breaks from SNL, we all meet up and do shows. It’s a grounding, fun thing. 

Between Dukes and SNL, you do a lot of collaborative comedy. What appeals to you and your comedic style about that? 
It’s just so much more fun to make comedy with your friends. I started making sketches during COVID as a way to find something fun in a time that was so awful. But it’s 100 times more fun, of course, to make things with other people. I’m so grateful to have found people that I love writing with so much. 

Were you able to find that at Oberlin, too? 
Definitely. I’m still close with a lot of my comedy friends from Oberlin. Ru Anderson ’19, who was a couple of years above me and also ran Good Talk. I’m friends with EJ Marcus ’19, who was also a Good Talk person, and Julie Friedman ’22, a great comedian who’s in LA now. 

What other lessons or experiences did you have at Oberlin that you keep with you in your post-grad life? 
It’s such a school of people doing these DIY events and making orgs and sketch teams and improv groups themselves. I think that [being at Oberlin] is such a time of learning that you can just decide with your friends to make something; there doesn’t have to be this big infrastructure. You can have an event in your backyard or make a comedy show. It’s a place of people doing things themselves.