Here’s some more Sketchwar commentary.  For the week of 3/6/09, the topic was “Game Shows”.

This time around, we had seven entries:  “Wouldn’t It Be Better If…”, “Pay to Play!”, “Danielle Steel or Steely Dan?”, “The Game Show”, “Wild Animals: Date or Mate”, “Make ‘Em Pay!”, and my own “Game-Show Crimefighters!”

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First up is “Wouldn’t It Be Better If…”.  Presidential Idol is a great concept.  The introductions, I’m a little on the fence about.  It feels like you’re spending the first minute or so laying pipe for the real comedy, but Bryan’s dialog is witty enough to keep me from getting bored.

Once we really get going, it’s… well, I like it well enough, but I see a lot of ways to improve it.  The “Denise née-Richards (right?) was disqualified” joke didn’t quite work for me — oh, is Billy Bob a Carter reference?  (I was very confused.)

Then the judges’ assessment of Stan, that’s really funny stuff.  That’s what I come to a Presidential Idol sketch to see.  In fact, I’d cut back to footage of the judges’ responses instead of having Bryan tell us about them.

In a similar fashion, if Yvonne and Bradley recounted their platforms themselves, it might be more cinematic (if less true to American Idol).

And yeah, giving the presidency to Seymour is the right button for this.

A couple of screenplay-technical notes:  try & avoid alliterative names (Stan, Seymour), and break up big blocks of prose text — either split things up with whitespace, or be more concise, or both.

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As for “Pay to Play!”, I actually don’t have much to say about this one.  The pacing feels right.  The game-show environments feels right.  Scrippets looks a little wonky on the formatting, but that’s the only real complaint I’ve got.

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“Danielle Steel or Steely Dan?” has, for my money, the funniest concept of the week.

That said, I’d probably make a bunch of tweaks to the structure.  I’d streamline the top of the scene — I think everybody gets the show concept from the show title, so I’d get to “Haitian Divorce” as soon as possible.  Maybe we’re coming back from the show’s last commercial break?

For the ‘non-lightning’ questions… I’d probably cut that down to just two questions (from four).  The made-up novels/songs are great, but even great summaries start to feel a bit logy after a while.  And I might restructure it so that Jill gets posed a question and then has thirty seconds to come up with her answer — so her description of the made-up novel/song has a ticking clock behind her and a tense musical accompaniment.

Once you get to the lightning round, you’re golden.  The only thing I’d suggest is tweaking Jill’s dialog so she gets more and more frustrated as the round goes on — give a bit of an arc to it.

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“The Game Show” is a perfect example of where to start a game-show sketch:  in medias res.  Just skip all the announcer-y setup and get straight to the, er, meat.

And this was another great blackout sketch.  It didn’t widely expand upon the idea of Ted Nugent’s game show, but it didn’t need to.  It hit a few great jokes and then stopped.  (All I would suggest is a funnier name than “Ted Nugent’s Game Show”, but nothing immediately springs to mind.)

Well-done, that.

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“Wild Animals: Date or Mate” is from a new contributor, E. L. Raica.  Again, I’d say to cut through the preamble faster — in medias res is your friend.  This, too, could do with ‘returning from a commercial break’ instead of ‘starting from the top’.

Once we get to the animals introducing themselves, then the comedy engine starts humming.  Including the amoeba is a stroke of genius:  “Asexual and lovin’ it!” is probably the line of the week.  Congrats to the newcomer!

That said, I’d generally look for ways to make this one go a lot faster.  For instance, for the closing bit, you could have Skip pose the last question, have Tracey pick the puddle of water, and then play us out.

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“Make ‘Em Pay!” has another great concept:  contestants competing for chances at revenge against corrupt bank executives.  We start in medias res (w00t!), and we could get going even faster:  Bert doesn’t have to describe the show at the top.  In fact, it’s probably funnier if the audience gets to figure it out for themselves.

In fact, as often happens, I’m trying to find the sketch that’s half as long and twice as funny.

The pen of executives is funny.  Vanessa’s description of what she would do for sixty-two million dollars is funny.  The wheel and the drama of the spin are funny.  The ‘glutton’ punishment was, to me, disturbing, but I can see people finding it funny.  Basically, if you can find the shortest sketch that connects these points, you’ll probably have a funnier sketch.  I don’t see anything that really needs cutting, but the whole thing could be streamlined.

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I was pretty happy with my own sketch this time around.  I mentioned last week that “after three weeks of not-exactly-humorous entries, I really need to get back to writing proper sketches again.”  I think I accomplished that.  The most obvious criticism is that I’m just doing “The X Presidents” only with game-show hosts, but I have no shame about stealing from Robert Smigel.

I didn’t decide to use this concept until I came up with the James Lipton angle.

Patton Oswalt does a bit about movie titles — specifically, he explains that a great title lets you watch a free movie in your head when you hear the title.  I think it’s the same for sketches — when the audience hears a really funny concept for a  sketch, they ‘see a free sketch in their heads’.  And the problem with an inherently funny sketch concept is that sometimes you, the writer, can’t do any better than what they just imagined.  (This is why improv troupes tend to shy away from inherently funny setups.)

So with this one, once I had Lipton in place, I knew I was golden.  I had something that could surprise the audience and take it beyond the pile of game-show-themed puns I so happily employed.

My only lingering issues with the sketch are that (1) I lay too much exposition-pipe at the start of the sketch, and (2) I never found a button I was satisfied with.  I couldn’t think of a joke that was really funny, so I just wrote the cheesiest joke I could think of.  I guess it works in that context.

That said, people seem to dig the sketch.  Hell, it might be my funniest Sketchwar entry since that dating one a few months back.  I am content.