Here’s my commentary for the 4/30/09 round of Sketchwar, which had the theme “Odd Sporting Events.”
I continue slowly catching up on Sketchwar commentary. I took this week off because I got face-malleted with a cold, and recovered from that just in time to fly off to Chicago. That plus my usual bent towards laziness equalled no sketch from Peter.
“Team Acme”
Hmm. Well, I give this one full marks for setting up a Rube Goldberg coyote-mishap worthy of Termite Terrace. But beyond that, adding the color commentary didn’t do much for me. As far as I could tell, the commentators didn’t do much beyond describe what was happening on the screen, which put a low ceiling on how funny they could get.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a funny sketch in here — I just think the commentators need to surprise me a bit. Maybe they persistently guess wrong about what the two creatures have in mind. Maybe they drag in wacky historical details and background trivia. Hell, I don’t know, maybe there’s weird unresolved sexual tension between the commentators.
I think the sketch is almost there; the commentators just need to do something beyond ‘describing the action’.
“¡El Ocho Es Muy Caliente!”
First, good on you for getting to the comedy quickly. One quick TV intro, and we’re off to the Chihuahua-diderod. And then, we move quickly to the croquet match, where the Xtreme/British conflict is a fine comedy generator. But then the braiding contest? Eh, not so good. There doesn’t seem to be a joke there beyond, “Wouldn’t it be strange to have a braiding contest?”
I think you could get a whole sketch out of those two OMG EXTREEEEEME hosts trying to comment on a croquet match. I really like watching those two get flustered by the genial English lawn game, and it seems like the hosts could have a bit of an arc to how they handle the situation.
(Wait, The Ocho was from Dodgeball, right? Ah well — easy enough to use a different name.)
“Bonfire of the Academies”
Yay Bob and Jim! Ms. Raica, any time you want to bring those two back to Sketchwar, they are welcome on my computer screen. And I love that they’re both bitter about the ridiculously small-time gig, but in unique (& conflicting) ways. (Side kvetch: Jim doesn’t need all those wrylies. We get that he’s bitter.)
I might cut the ball-gag joke. I’m not sure why, though. I suspect that having one source of zany (the bonfire-leaping) is fine, but adding additional sources of zany (ballgag, etc.) is too much of a muchness, unless you’re going for balls-to-the-wall, brain-exploding absurdity. Basically the number of zany-sources in a sketch should be zero, one, or infinity — not two.
I feel ambivalent towards the event itself. I get that it’s a neat little satire on college-professor life, but I feel like the sketch is really about Jim and Bob. When we were apart from Jim and Bob, I was watching jokes that I could appreciate intellectually, but didn’t really care about.
That said, nude-Jim taking out the competitor was a great way to wrap up the story. You might try to trim down the material from “the mob pursues Jim into the cornfield” to the end, but the general shape of it — Jim faceplants by the table, Jim voices his complaints, Bob says that last line — feels sound.