Here’s my commentary for the 5/20/09 round of Sketchwar, which had the theme “The State of Health Care.”

I continue slowly catching up on Sketchwar commentary. I think we all hated this topic — not Oprah-level hate, but hate nonetheless. It’s hard to predict which topics are going to be agonizing for the Sketchwar types….
 
 
“Clean Bill of Health”
Mr. Coyote’s comment on this was, “I think there are two good sketches that could be made from this mess, but I don’t have either of them.”

And maybe that’s so. While I appreciated “barbers do liposuction” as a concept, the execution pretty much just grossed me out. Maybe I’m not familiar enough with traditional barber shops to be amused by the surgical variation on the place.

Then there’s the news segment — again, I think there’s the start of a good concept in there. Making fun of corrupt politicians is always gold, and rampant organ piracy is awesome in a “Modest Proposal” sort of way. But then, I don’t think the segment really tops the setup — it just explains the concept, gets one good dig against Ted Kennedy in there, and stops.

As far as I can tell, the third chunk has the most potential — it could be one of those sketches that takes the basic high concept (“barbers perform surgery”) and makes an interesting scene out of it (“reluctant couple gets medical care at the barber shop”). I liked Johnny’s bedside manner, and I liked how flummoxed the situation made Lisa.

I’m not sure exactly how you would have expanded the third chunk to the whole scene, but I think that would be the best route to go with the material.
 
 
“Stuck Between a Rock and a Bitch of Gurney”
This is an odd one. It didn’t make me laugh much, but it held my attention, as the kids say, liek whoa. Just the fact that such horrible physical mishaps could happen to these poor patients at any time was enough to keep my eyes on the page. And the tense, miserable, overcrowded hospital room was (knock on wood) so far outside my experience that the setting was really novel and engaging.

Basically, the whole time I wasn’t so much “full of chuckles” as I was “queasy and horrified”, but I get the feeling that this was completely intentional on Lynn’s part.

The sketch didn’t seem to have much shape to it — the incidents could have been rearranged in a different order without changing the sketch much — but I don’t know if that hurts the sketch much. It might be a better sketch if it had an arc — say, the things Alberto has to deal with get awful-er and awful-re — but I think this one isn’t so much about its plot. It’s just there to convey a setting, a really horrible setting.
 
 
“Medicine of the Future”
Well, this is also an odd one. I know I wrote this whole sketch just so I could include the line, “I’m going to have cancer for three days?” I sort of built the sketch around it, IIRC.

I come from a family full of doctors, so I wind up hearing the other end of medicine — the peevish patients who repeatedly demand to see the attending physician (i.e. the supervisor) for their sprained pinky. Couple that with the fact that nobody seems to have any respect for the progress that medicine has made (no, I don’t want to time-travel back to the 19th century, because, hello!, I don’t want to die of cholera), and I saw the potential for comedy.

I don’t think I quite got there. Like I said, this sketch was basically an excuse to include one funny line, so I spend about a page laying pipe so I can get to that line. There’s lots of cute sci-fi talk, but not a lot of funny.

At the end of the sketch, I pull another crazy Ivan and veer off into an “sexy-robot salesman” ad. I don’t know if that was particularly hilarious, but it was a neat twist for the end of the sketch.