CLOTHES ENCOUNTERS Marz Timms of Pimprov and the members of kevINda show off their duds. Guess which one’s the pimp.

“Audiences tend to be surprised,” says Inda Craig-Galván, half of the politically charged sketch duo kevINda. “They’ll come up to us after our show and say, ‘You guys are so smart.’ It’s like they expected us to buffoon and do Jimmie J.J. Walker.” She isn’t talking about some long-ago show or backwoods venue. Her group—which will join Schadenfreude at Steppenwolf’s Celebration of Chicago Sketch Comedy Monday 14—performs for Los Angeles industry folk and audiences at national comedy festivals. The reality is that even for African-American sketch and improv groups that find success, the going remains rough.

For one thing, minority performers are in short supply: When Craig-Galván and partner Kevin Douglas attend fests, they’re almost always the sole African-American group performing. Craig-Galván is taking classes at the Annoyance Theatre, where she’s the only person of color—a situation that’s also prevalent at iO, where she’s been advised by a fellow performer not to enroll.

Marz Timms can relate: When the founder of the five-man Pimprov (which starts a run at Chemically Imbalanced Comedy Saturday 12) began studying improv in 1995, he says, “I was it as far as minorities.” He later met David Pompeii, an African-American Second City mainstager, who encouraged him to work with that Chicago institution. Though Timms turned down a spot with Second City’s touring company (in favor of pursuing his own projects), he eventually made his way onto its Donny’s Skybox stage with Second City’s Outreach & Diversity program—designed to unite minority performers and provide a diverse audience access to sketch and improv comedy. “They were like a black family,” Timms says. “I thought, Finally, people who improvise that I can relate to and do shows with.”

That’s just it: As welcoming as improv is as an art form, Craig-Galván admits she isn’t always comfortable in racially mixed groups, like her improv team a few years back. “We’d be doing scenes, and I’d say something like ‘I love you’ or ‘Hey, Dad’ and the response would sometimes be, ‘But you’re black.’ It’s bad enough to have your initiation denied—but getting denied because of race sucks,” she says, adding that it’s more of an issue with younger, white improvisers new to the city. “People move to Chicago’s North Side and truly don’t run into a lot of South Side black folk.”

The bottom line: “If you don’t feel welcome and you don’t see yourself represented on stage, you’re not going to be drawn to [sketch and improv],” Craig-Galván says. That’s where Dionna Griffin-Irons—Second City’s producer of Outreach & Diversity and self-proclaimed “mother” of minority improv—sees her program having the greatest potential to effect change. In addition to performing two Skybox revues a year and putting on summer workshops, the group’s house ensemble (affectionately dubbed Brown Co) nurtures talent for high-profile spots on SC’s resident stages. Maintaining an eye toward diversity demonstrates to other nonwhite performers, according to Griffin-Irons, that their stories can be told through mediums other than the usual (i.e., theater and stand-up).

Craig-Galván and Douglas clicked when both joined Brown Co in 2002. The pair branched off on their own two years later, writing sketches based on trends and events they found upsetting. Those pieces turned into a show dealing with racial issues—the “plight of the Negro,” as Craig-Galván puts it. (Even an anal-sex joke morphed into a scene about Martin Luther King.)

Yet Brown Co doesn’t just train actors to take on social-justice issues—Timms decided to found Pimprov in 2004 simply because he thought the idea of pimps performing improv was hilarious. (It is.) “I’d have a problem if I felt we were representing the voice of black improvisers, because this show is merely for entertainment,” he says.

Still, Timms says sometimes Pimprov offends—both those who see it as glorifying the pimping lifestyle and those who read further between the lines. “I bashed Tyler Perry the other day, and this lady just had a heart attack,” Timms says. The woman countered that he should support Perry out of race solidarity, and that she would see one of Timms’s shows just because he’s black. “And I said, ‘Look, don’t come see my show ’cause it’s a black show—come see it because you find it funny.’ ”

kevINda storms Steppenwolf Monday 14, and Pimprov struts to CIC Saturday 12.