Sketch War

Category: Analysis

In-depth analysis of our sketches, and others.

  • Thoughts on sketch comedy

    There’s a lot of sketch comedy out there, and a lot of ideas on what makes sketch work. Even on our little platoon of sketch-warriors, you can see different schools of thought at work in our material. I thought I’d kick out some of the guiding principles I use when I’m working on a sketch.

    I think I’m the only active performer in our group (Mr. Brownlee’s recent leading role aside :). I do 2-4 live improv shows a month, varying from “Whose Line” type shows to full length improvised musicals and Quentin Tarantino homages. So I think I always have that feeling of making something work on stage when I work on pieces.

    The sketches that I’ve always loved have always had a satirical edge to them – like Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin sketches , Dave Chapelle’s Ethnic Draft on the Chapelle show, Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks or Upper Class Twit of the Year (the Pythons were MASTERS of absurd satire). Satire to me isn’t necessarily political, they just have a target, something to say. They also have a basis in some readily apparent truth. Mad TV never did much for me because their sketches always seemed to be about throwing the weirdest possible character into some situation, and letting the wackiness begin. In the end, the sketch didn’t give us any food for thought, so our brains would toss it to make room for more important stuff. Every week when we get a topic, I look at it from the standpoint of “is there an aspect of this topic that I have a strong opinion about”, and start from there. If nothing comes from the topic itself, I explode it out until I find something I have an opinion about – “3:34am” led me to thinking about torture tactics, “advertising” led me to thinking about car ads, the current state of the American automobile industry and how it got that way.

    Once I have that I start thinking about the characters and relationships. I try to work on those at first more so than the narrative (plot) of the sketch. Creating a comic character, which is really just an exceptionally flawed human being, who breathes and reacts emotionally as he \ she tries to navigate through some situation generally leads me to plot points and actions more unique than I could find by sitting down and plotting things out. The relationship thing is definitely driven by my performer side – improv scenes that have a chance of going anywhere are always relationship driven. This is also where conflict, objectives (what the characters want) and obstacles (what stops them from getting it) comes from.

    Sometimes there isn’t an obvious relationship in a sketch – the car ad this week is a great example. But there is still a relationship, and objective, and an obstacle to be overcome with different tactics. The relationship in the car ad is bewteen the car companies and the viewing consumer. The car makers want people to buy, the consumer doesnt’t want to because times are tough. Objectives and obstacles – we’ve got some drama…whooohooo! The relationship then comes in – the car makers are pissed at consumers (us), so they’ll smack us with overwhleming Americana to make us feel heroic and patriotic, none of which has a damn thing to do with buying a car. The rest of the ad then becomes the car maker doing whatever they can to convince the consumer why they should go out and buy something despite the myriad reasons not too (fuel economy, image, technology, etc).

    I try to avoid the “joke for the joke’s sake”…I think sketches work best when the humor comes out of the situation and the charcaters, but sometimes there’s a cheap gag you just can’t pass up. Same with characters and plot points – sometimes there’s one so juicy you just can’t pass it up, and sometimes you regret it when you don’t.

    One thing I’m always working on is tightening scenes. As a performer, I like to give other performers the time to get emotionally invested, time to build tension, and a chance to act between the lines or play subtext. As a writer, it means I tend to create a lot of air by tossing in throwaway dialogue that I can do without. It’s filler that might be okay for two improvisors trying to find a scene, but it should get whacked out for a tight sketch scene.

    And I’m always working on clarifying my message, making my characters sharper (and more comically flawed), making their objectives clearer, the stakes higher, and the tactics more creative, and hopefully more active – it seems that, in my sketches at least, it can get awfully easy to let charcaters sit around and get talky.

    There’s a lot of philosphies about sketch (and comedy in general) out there, and all have merit. But this is what appeals to me, what stays with me after wacthing, and what makes me laugh. And I’ll keep working at it until I perfect it (which, of course will be never).

    Thoughts??

  • R.A.’s self-critique: Advertising Edition

    My advertising sketch is yet another example of an interesting premise in need of editing. I seem to be producing a lot of these lately. It’s a simple blackout, but I dragged it out by inserting the second scene in 1992. I think it’s necessary for internal narrative cohesiveness, but lessens the overall impact. Way too much time passes from setup to finish.

    Then I made matters worse because I didn’t trust the blackout.

    The second scene could probably have been a two- or three-liner, but I wanted to include the little “soften the ground” joke. It’s not a big laugh, good at best for a chuckle in retrospect after the final joke falls, and clearly unnecessary.

    Worse is the first scene. As I was writing the sketch I tried dealing with the tension between getting to the end fast and actually making the sketch *funny*. One joke sketches scare me. If the joke’s not funny enough, they’re complete failures. So I stuffed in the Don/Darren/Rock jokes, of which I hope everyone got at least two (and a gold star to anyone who got all three,) hoping to ensure at least a couple of chuckles. But of course that delays the time to blackout more, so it’s probably a net humor loss. Also, they should have hit quicker with a ba-ba-boom, boom, boom pattern. Oh yeah, and I *hated* the whole “crow kept tapping” crap but couldn’t think of a better way of implying Darren had been transformed. Ugh.

    And of course, the biggest worry is that the big joke didn’t actually land. Y’all got that Gareth’s dad wanted to “sell ice to an Eskimo”, right?

  • Peter’s Commentary on the ‘Resolutions’ Edition

    Finally catching up on my Friday Sketch War commentary. This past week, the FSW deadline fell on January second, so we went with the holiday-appropriate theme of “resolutions”.

    This time we had only two entries (*sniff*): this one from me and this one from Mr. Porter.[1] Alas, all the talk from local sketch-comedy types about joining in on this turned out to be just talk. (Ah well. Writing to a weekly deadline is hard work.)

    When I posted my entry, I mentioned on twitter that “I imagine I like [this sketch] better than most folks will”.

    Look, I recognize that this entry is very slight: man climbs mountain, man discovers that it’s now a tourist trap, end scene. But I still think it would play funnier than it reads. This script is more elliptical than usual. Riley talks around the fact that his wife died, probably recently. I don’t explicitly say that Jerry feels awful having to be the guy who reveals it’s no longer “the most secluded place in the world”, or how it breaks the spell of sharing a quiet, profound moment in the middle of nowhere.

    So I think there’s a good scene in there. I’ll bet if I expand it to three minutes or so, it’ll be something worth watching.

    It’s odd how this one came about. For the longest time I had a more straightforward and “think-y” concept for a sketch: a guy had hired somebody to enforce his adherence to a simple resolution (“Don’t eat donuts.”) The button would be a simple loop, where the enforcer’s enforcer came in to enforce the enforcer’s resolution (“Don’t use tasers on clients.”)

    But then I started listening to this song over and over again, which made me think of winter in places that actually have winter, and got me wondering what hiking through the snow might have to do with resolutions. Soon I had dumped my straightforward and promising sketch for this other, quirkier piece — something about a widower climbing a montain — that I felt like I needed to write.

    Mr. Porter’s piece was about angels who worked in a divine division devoted to getting mortals to break their new year’s resolutions. I think that’s a really strong concept, especially since he’s got Clarence (as in “Attaboy, Clarence!”, as in It’s a Wonderful Life), with his newly-acquired wings, as our viewpoint character.

    It stumbles in a few places. The scene’s setup is not in and of itself funny, so it needs to either become funny or become shorter. (I’m guessing the latter, in medias res-ifying route is the easier one.) I would have liked to see a greater variety in the ways the angels are tempting people — if it’s sketch comedy, and I’ve seen one perfectly normal form of temptation, I’m let down if the next form of temptation isn’t a bit batshit and unexpected. Basically, the tempting needs some way to be really funny in and of itself — that’s a good way to make the sketch funnier than just its original premise.

    And then there’s the button. I think I get what Mr. Porter was getting at — George Bailey’s bank got hit by some form of government regulation, and now Clarence is being punished. Or maybe that’s not it at all — I mean, why would Job (blessed man, lived righteously, yada yada) be there?

    So I guess the ‘regulators’ is just a quick one-off joke that’s not related to the sketch? If that’s the case, I’d probably delete it — unrelated material at the very very end only sows confusion (see above).

    No, this scene needs a button that ties in to the scene we’ve seen so far, and somehow cleverly inverts it. And yeah, no idea what that should be — although if Mr. Porter were an utter bastard, then Clarence’s first assignment would be George Bailey, no?

    I dunno. I harp on these flaws because I think the idea is strong, ergo I think there’s a good in scene in there. *shrug*

    __________
    [1] I again took on summary-writing duties.

  • Peter’s Commentary on the ‘Christmas Presents’ Edition

    Still a bit behind in writing commentary on the Friday Sketch War. I thought I’d deliver a few words about the “Christmas Presents” round.

    We’d talked about maybe skipping the 12/26 week of sketchwar, on account of everybody’d be busy with the holidays. But a couple of us believed strongly in the “it’s easier to keep writing than to stop and then start again” school of writing. We compromised by having a week where we just wrote mini-scenes. Two lines of dialog. Like comedy-sketch haiku.

    The results of the “Sketch Skirmish” are here.

    I had fun with my little two-line thing. Given the freedom to toss off anything without worrying about developing it for a few pages, I wound up with the sort of mean-spirited surrealism that characterizes most of the humor in my immediate family. The other two competitors were more talk-y and think-y, which resulted in exchanges that were rather interesting, whereas mine was just a quick, “Wait, what just happened?!”

    All in all, I declare the compromise plan a success. We all were able to throw something together, and we were well-prepared to keep the train going the following week.

  • Peter’s Commentary on the ‘3:34am’ Edition

    Hello — looks like I’ve fallen a bit behind in writing commentary on the Friday Sketch War.

    On December 19th, we all handed in sketches based on the theme “3:34am”. I had suggested “Santa”, “The Recording Studio”, and “3:34am” to Mr. Porter, and he opted for the weird one.[1]

    We had three sketches that week. I wrote this one, Mr. Porter wrote this one, and Mr. Robertson wrote this one. (I also wrote that week’s summary.)

    There is one and only one thing I was happy about with my own sketch. Specifically, I think I hit upon a structure for a comedy sketch that I’d like to use again.

    First, I need to back up and explain: sketches are different from scenes. Scenes are about a character who pursues an objective and overcomes adversity. Sketches are about something funny that happens, something funnier that happens, and then something even funnier that happens. Sure, you can write an amazing miracle-scene that does both, but it’s damn difficult. When scenes try to be sketches, they feel shallow and stupid. When sketches try to be scenes, they feel unfunny and pretentious.

    This structural difference makes scenes rather easy to end: you resolve the central conflict and the scene feels ‘done’. Sketches, on the other hand, are an absolute bear to end. All you have is a chain of funnier and funnier events, but nothing the audience cares about is at stake, so nothing you do will resolve that and make the sketch *feel like* it’s over. The best you can do is just write a hilarious joke, bring the lights down, and move on to the next thing before anybody notices.[2]

    But I think I did something clever with this. I introduced a situation: Sanjay is trying to make a presentation. Then the janitor comes by and interferes in ways that are increasingly wacky. And then the payoff at the end is that you realized the executives are preparing a LARP session. Suddenly the wacky janitor-actions all fit together, and that resolution makes the sketch feel like it’s finished.

    But like I said, that was the *only* thing I liked with that scene.[3] The topic just kicked my ass that week, I ran with the best idea I could cough up, and… meh. None of it made me laugh [4] — unlike my entries the previous two weeks, which had me giggling like mad.

    The previous two weeks were easier to write, too. The tragic thing about sketch-writing is that when I’m writing something funny, the first draft just ‘happens’. When I’m writing something lame, the first draft passes like a recalcitrant kidney stone. This was the latter.

    Anyway, the structure shows promise.

    I was happy to see Mr. Porter trying a “list sketch” this time ’round — I’d given it a shot for the “First Dates” round, and I was curious to see how the other sketchwar types might handle it. Instead of dates going wrong, Mr. Porter has a protagonist (Jared) who keeps getting woken up at 3:34am in various ways.

    I liked that it wasn’t totally a list sketch. It’s not just a list of ways to get woken up, it’s a series of wakings-up in chronological order, so we follow Jared through one damn thing after another, and the sketch has a through-line with Jared getting more and more frustrated.

    I think it generally works. There’s a solid button, with Jared cooped up in a loony bin, but happy.[5] The ‘traveling to various quiet parts of the world’ is a nice way of upping the ante.

    Yet I found myself wishing that the things that went wrong for Jared would get crazier. Basically, I want the audience thinking two things: (1) “Surely *nothing* can go wrong *now*”, and (2) “Oh, god, there’s no *way* he would have thought to guard against *that*!” I think we’ve all had that moment where we’ve made perfect plans to stave off some Horrid Thing That Keeps Going Wrong, and then the universe still finds a way to screw us — so there’s something deeply satsifying about seeing it happen to a protagonist.[6]

    No word from Mr. Robertson about wanting sharp and/or pointy criticism, so I’ll kick back and make a few vague statements. I love the situation: Santa gives up on just knowing which kids are naughty and nice, and commences hard-core interrogations. And turning it political (“I pop down the wrong chimney one night and BOOM! I’m a hostage with a ransom video showing 24/7 on Al Jazeera.”) is perfectly appropriate.

    I think it just needs paring down — sketches longer than a few minutes tend to get stale (y halo thar Saturday Night Live). Go over it, make it two-thirds as long, and it’ll get 50% funnier.

    On a technical note, its prose is too novel-y and needs to be more screenplay-y. Any decent screenwriting book should have pointers about that.

    And that’s it for the 12/19 edition of Friday Sketch War. I am now one week closer to being caught up.

    ______________
    [1] Side note: I like this method of picking a topic, though — that is, having several people throw out suggestions and one person pick from those. It makes the eventual topic no one person’s responsibility, and by “responsibility” I mean “fault”, and by “fault”, I mean, “It’s bloody difficult to come up with something funny to say about 3:34am.”

    This way, it’s kind of like giving only one real bullet to a firing squad.

    [2] See also: Monty Python, who almost never ended their scenes, but just segued through from one to the next. Side note: even with comedy sketches that I love, I can rarely remember how they end.

    [3] Okay, and I was happy with the voice for Mr. Abbas.

    [4] Also, this stage direction was ‘for the lose’: “A wall clock tells us it’s 3:34. The darkened windows along the wall tell us it’s 3:34am.” Too precious by half on that bit.

    [5] … though I might have reversed it — shown the clock at the nurse’s station first, *then* revealed happy!Jared in his padded cell.

    [6] It also sets up a game between the audience and the writer — the audience tries to guess how the writer can possibly screw over the hero *now*, right up to the point when the screwing-over transpires.

  • Peter’s Commentary on the ‘First Dates’ Edition

    This past week, the Friday Sketch War topic was “First Dates”.

    We had three sketches this time around:  mine, Mr. Porter’s, and Mr. Robertson’s.

    All in all, I’m happy with how my sketch came out.

    Like the previous week, I was trying to move away from traditional scene-y sketches, and trade off plot for funny. I’d just seen SNL’s “Extreme Challenge” digital short, which is a complete “list sketch”, and I figured I’d try something like that. Or rather, I came up with a bunch of scene-y things I could do with the topic, hated all of them, and went with the “list of bad dates” idea that could let my imagination run amok.

    It felt kind of like a cop-out, since coming up with a list of jokes is easier than constructing a plot, and because I’d done this structure before. (And so have lots of people.) But I just kept scribbling down ideas that made me laugh, and laughter trumps everything.

    I was happy with how I structured the piece. I started out sensible and normal. I probably should have pushed 5 and 5b to position 3, but I think the general shape still works. And what I like is that by around 6 or 7, the audience honestly doesn’t think it could get further out there. Once you’ve played the ‘death’ and ‘ninja’ cards, you’re done, right? So I think what works here is hitting that ‘this can’t get any crazier’ point halfway through the sketch, and shooting straight past it to things the audience wouldn’t expect.

    Similarly-and-on-a-smaller-scale, I was happy when individual bits went further than the setup would imply they could go. For instance, there are two parts of the ‘chicken’ bit — you think it’s just an absurd bit, but no, there’s an additional joke about Wendy possibly eating Neil.

    (Side note: I’m amused with how geeky this came out. It’s probably the result of working on this post at the same time.)

    Other things in the sketch worked less well. The paddle-ball was a pretty weak runner, appearing only twice and not being particularly funny. I’m not sure #3 (the cop bit) quite reads. I knew I wanted “You didn’t make it clear that it *was* a date” as one of the items, but it was damned difficult for me to express that situation in a silent scene.

    Also, the sketch’s ending is a bit anticlimactic. Writing the end of a comedy sketch is always brutal, because sketches aren’t really about stories, they’re about jokes. Stories end; a series of jokes just stops. But if you’re writing sketch comedy that isn’t scene-based, then you’re even more screwed, ‘cos there’s no story at *all* — you either have to come up with a joke so hilarious that nothing can follow it, pull off a joke that reincorporates lots of earlier material, or tweak the premise in some cutesy way.

    I opted for the third route, with middling success.

    Anyway, hopefully I’ll do something more scene-like next time, although the topic (“3:34am”) looks to be a challenging one.

    So let’s see here — Mr. Robertson’s sketch is called “Honesty”, and shows us a met-on-the-Internet first date where the honesty gets crazily out of hand, covering pretty much every lie everybody ever put on a match.com profile.

    Mr. Porter’s sketch is about “the *first* date”, as in the Garden of Eden. This one didn’t really do much for me, and I’m not sure how I’d try to fix it.

    My only guess is that I’d try to ‘turn up the volume’ on everything: make Adam even *more* of a wide-eyed rube, make Lilith even *more* of a femme fatale — but also make the things Lilith ask for even more outré, and make Adam even more offended (or nonplussed) by them. And maybe focus on making Adam trying even harder to please Lilith — the internal conflict where Adam is diametrically opposed to everything Lilith stands for, but he still desperately wants to make her happy, could be funny if it played out for a bit.

    I think the ending works, though. Divine intervention seems like the logical conclusion for this piece. And even if the audience doesn’t get that it’s Lilith being replaced by Eve, the general idea comes across, I think.

    Anyway, next week is the topic “3:34am”. We’ll see what folks can come up with for that.

  • Peter’s Commentary on the ‘Learning Something New About History’ Edition

    Last week’s FSW topic was “Learning something new about history”.

    Last week, Mr. Porter let me pick the week’s sketch topic. I actually deliberated for quite a while. I didn’t want something so vague/broad that it suggested nothing to the writers, but nor did I want something so specific that it straitjacketed people. I finally settled on “learning something new about history”.

    I think it first occurred to me partly because sadogre had mentioned an interest in sketchwar, and I figured this would be right up his alley. The more I thought about it, the promising it sounded. People could do any number of “learn the real story of <x>” sketches. They could do sketches about learning something new about one’s family history or personal history. Or it could be about actually learning history, like a college course or something.

    So I sent off that topic and happily started compiling sketch ideas along those lines. Then at some point I flashed back to this narwhal-themed thread, and wrote the words “F***ING HANNIBAL F*** YEAH”, only without the bowdlerizing asterisks. I thought of other, more original ideas, but I kept coming back to that one. So that’s the one I wrote.

    I’m happy with how it came out.

    First off, I’m happy that I didn’t write a scene. I’d just watched another SNL digital short, and suddenly I wanted to write something like *that* — to just jettison all the principles of drama and scenecraft and focus on stringing together three minutes of funny. If you keep ’em laughing for three minutes, who cares if you don’t have a story?[1]

    Fortunately, I fell into the “F*** YEAH!” voice pretty naturally, and I had a pretty obvious structure to follow: relate the Battle of the Tremia, and then tack on some concluding words. Easy-peasy. I had already brainstormed a bunch of comic bits to include, so I churned out the sketch in about an hour. It made me laugh[2], and I was happy.

    This week had two other entries: Mr. Robertson wrote about how the Three Wise Men picked their gifts, and Mr. Porter wrote about a conspiracy theorist.

    Mr. Porter didn’t like the topic much, which I felt bad about. I had hoped I’d picked something that would help inspire the other writers. Then again, Mr. Porter himself had picked “Oprah” as the previous week’s topic, so none of us are immune from bad-topic-picking.

    After last week’s post, Mr. Porter requested sharp and pointy notes on his sketches, so I’ll do my best to provide that this week.

    Here’s what I got this time around: first, get out of my head. Yes, I have had pretty much that exact conversation. *shudder*

    Now, writing-wise, there are two ways to go with this sketch. First, you can give the conversation heavier emotional stakes. You did a great thing towards the end with the line, “Michael. Seriously. You need help.” If you can get that vibe *throughout* the sketch — that Peter really cares about Michael, and he’s scared by the shocking amounts of crazy — that’ll help draw the audience in. Defining the relationship between the two guys might help with that.

    Also along ‘make it more emotional’ lines, I can suggest a possibly-useful question. Nearly everybody would find Michael’s nonsense annoying, right? The question to ask is: why is it *especially* annoying to Peter? Why is Peter the *worst possible person* for this to happen to? If you get Peter desperately wanting to help Michael, but also infuriated beyond all reason, then you’ve got an audience paying attention.[3] Peter’s flustered quality is a real strength here, and you can emphasize that.

    Okay, so the ’emotional’ thing is angle #1. Angle #2 is the ‘wacky’ thing. To put it bluntly, I don’t think Michael gets crazy enough. You may be sputtering in disbelief right now, but really: real conspiracy theorists are even crazier than Michael. I’d lengthen the ‘slightly crazy’ talk at the beginning, pare down a bunch of ‘moderately crazy’ stuff in the middle, and add some ‘extreme batshit crazy’ lines towards the end. Seriously, you have not gone ‘too crazy’ until you hit “they’ve implanted a chip in my scalp and if you just hand me that penknife I can show you” crazy.

    Finally, last complaint: I could do lots of little edits here and there, removing words and phrases. For instance, I’d cut “writing on my blog and mailing out the newsletter” to just one of the two. But these are just small edits I’m takling about, and I think when I edit I like to err on the side of making lines too short.

    Okay, enough complaining. There are many things to like here.

    First and foremost, yes of course that’s the right button to end on. Absolutely perfect. And I loved all the different reactions Peter went through — I hate scenes where everyone has the exact same attitude through the whole thing, but we see Peter being confused, curious, annoyed, humoring, and ultimately sympathetic. Well-played, that. And the historical facts that Michael keeps screwing up are priceless, and you ramp up the crazy nicely as the sketch goes on.

    I laughed in spite of the “OH GOD IT’S MY LIFE OW OW OW”.

    [1] The irony here is that last year, when I took a class in sketch-writing, I really chaffed at being required to write sketches that weren’t structured like proper dramatic scenes. Now I’m embracing it. *shrug* I contain multitudes, etc.


    [2] Favorite moment: the sudden and unexpected appearance of Babar.


    [3] One (lousy) possibility: Peter is a history buff, and he’s reading a biography of Truman that prompts the whole conversation.

  • Peter’s Commentary on the ‘Oprah’ Edition

    Okay, so last week’s FSW topic was “Oprah”.

    So I wound up writing this sketch. I had spent days trying to think of something — *anything* — that I could do with the topic. I think the best I managed was a couple’s young daughter idolizes Oprah and causes embarrassing situations by trying to treat her parents as talk-show guests.

    Then I visited my family for Thanksgiving and talked about the topic with my sister, who watches the show from time to time. I somehow stumbled into, “What if some guy had a big collection of Oprah porn?”

    Katherine immediately said, “You probably should run with that.” Then we stood around the dining room trying to think of the most disturbing things one could do with that topic.

    I’m actually quite happy with the end result. I haven’t tried to write a scene that’s “OH GOD NO”-creepy before, so that was interesting. Apparently the scene thoroughly disgusted this round’s other two entrants, which I guess means that I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. And I think I struck a nice compromise between sketch structure (funny, Funny, FUNNY!, end) and scenework (hero pursues an objective and faces complications).

    It bugs me, though, that I didn’t get the structure quite right. The opening scene in the living room works okay — Matthew’s series of reactions amuses me — but it feels kind of tacked on. And I could have improved the reversal at the end, where I reveal that Chase’s Oprah fetish is actually a cover for his roommate fetish. I keep trying to use a sudden twist as a sketch’s button, but the twists are never clear enough, or they don’t make sense at all.

    For this round, Coyote wrote this sketch, and Ken Robertson wrote this one. I laughed out loud at “You watch a lot of shows on that LG HDTV refrigerator at your place?” / “Sometimes!”. I also laughed out loud when, at the exact moment when I thought Ken’s sketch couldn’t get any crazier, the Mayan death god Cizin appeared. Well-played, sirs.

    (If anybody wants me to get all detailed and critiquey with their sketchwar entries, lemme know. I may not know what I’m doing w/r/t sketch, but I can easily blather on about sketches in an opinionated fashion.)

    On to next week! Once Mr. Porter posts the recap for this week, I’ll post about the “learning something new about history” round.

  • Peter’s Commentary on the ‘Horrible Family Holidays’ Edition

    [Catching up on blogposts, now that I’ve recovered from the Dance Weekend That Ate My Life.]

    Just thought I’d put up some thoughts on the most recent Sketch War.

    Ken Robertson’s entry: laughed aloud at “No ‘Christians and Heathens’, okay?” / “Awwww.”. I liked the payoff at the end — possibly could have trimmed the number of awkward moments leading up to it, though Priscilla’s drunken pass at Massotihan was a great über-embarrassing exchange.

    R. A. Porter’s entry: Ow! Ow ow ow ow! These aren’t my memories, but it’s like they are my memories! My painful, painful memories! Ow!

    With regards to my own entry, I’m mostly just proud that I managed to pound *something* out on time. I spent Tuesday fishing for a topic, scribbled out some ideas on Wednesday, and carved out an hour or two from Friday night — in the thick of ALX — to lock myself in a little room until the pages were finished. Things I liked: simple sketch concept, wrote with clear characters in mind, invented a puppet troupe. Things I didn’t like: random ending (why would Katie flee the scene?), should have pushed the jokes to be more surreal and out-there, and I put an emotional tilt into a comedy sketch, which is kind of wrong. (Sketch comedy isn’t about emotional arcs — the structure is more like “funny. Funny. FUNNY! done.”)

    Oh, and I screwed up on the topic: I mis-read it as “horrible family gatherings”, came up with my sketch, and then realized it was “horrible family holidays”. Then I shoehorned some Christmas decorations into the stage directions. (That’s the magic of screenwriting, kids! Change the time of year just by typing a few extra words!)

    Lord knows how I’ll come up with a sketch on the topic of “Oprah”.

  • Answer Key to Friday’s Sketch

    Okay. I realize I overreached so far on yesterday’s sketch that it appears I’ve had a stroke. To assure you all, the ASPBV (American Society for the Protection of Blood Vessels) monitored the writing of that sketch and no blood vessels were injured in the production.

    So here’s a quick legend:

    • The patient is named Jim Halpert. If you don’t know, he’s a character on the American version of The Office. If you watch, you might remember this prank.
      • Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.
    • The second man is Bear McCreary. That’s two ‘bears’. I specifically chose McCreary as the second Bear because he is the composer for BSG. Also writes a great blog on the process, here.
    • I should have been clearer about the soup that looks like blood. It’s borscht. That’s the ‘beets’.
    • When Edward James Olmos shows up, that’s the explicit BSG reference.
    • No next appointment for the patient until 2009 because last night was BSG’s season finale.
    • One more throwaway joke: McCreary was wearing a yellow smiley face and spilled borscht on it. That joke will make a lot more sense to a lot more people in 2009, but if you’ve read The Watchmen, you should get it.

    I’m not being defensive. I knew when I wrote the scene it had a limited audience. I just didn’t realize I’d made it *that* limited! 🙂

    Oh well. Next week will be better.