{"id":674,"date":"2009-03-07T14:50:31","date_gmt":"2009-03-07T21:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wwwold.sketchwar.org\/?p=674"},"modified":"2009-03-07T14:50:31","modified_gmt":"2009-03-07T21:50:31","slug":"peters-commentary-on-the-game-shows-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/?p=674","title":{"rendered":"Peter’s Commentary on the “Game Shows” Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s some more Sketchwar<\/a> commentary.\u00a0 For the week of 3\/6\/09, the topic was “Game Shows”.<\/p>\n

This time around, we had seven entries:\u00a0 “Wouldn\u2019t It Be Better If\u2026”<\/a>, “Pay to Play!”<\/a>, “Danielle Steel or Steely Dan?”<\/a>, “The Game Show”<\/a>, “Wild Animals: Date or Mate”<\/a>, “Make \u2018Em Pay!”<\/a>, and my own “Game-Show Crimefighters!”<\/a><\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

First up is “Wouldn\u2019t It Be Better If\u2026”<\/a>.\u00a0 Presidential Idol<\/em> is a great concept.\u00a0 The introductions, I’m a little on the fence about.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Once we really get going, it’s… well, I like it well enough, but I see a lot of ways to improve it.\u00a0 The “Denise n\u00e9e-Richards (right?)<\/small> was disqualified” joke didn’t quite work for me — oh, is Billy Bob a Carter reference?\u00a0 (I was very confused.)<\/p>\n

Then the judges’ assessment of Stan, that’s really funny stuff.\u00a0 That’s what I come to a Presidential Idol<\/em> sketch to see.\u00a0 In fact, I’d cut back to footage of the judges’ responses instead of having Bryan tell us about them.<\/p>\n

In a similar fashion, if Yvonne and Bradley recounted their platforms themselves, it might be more cinematic (if less true to American Idol<\/em>).<\/p>\n

And yeah, giving the presidency to Seymour is the right button for this.<\/p>\n

A couple of screenplay-technical notes:\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

As for “Pay to Play!”<\/a>, I actually don’t have much to say about this one.\u00a0 The pacing feels right.\u00a0 The game-show environments feels right.\u00a0 Scrippets looks a little wonky on the formatting, but that’s the only real complaint I’ve got.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

“Danielle Steel or Steely Dan?”<\/a> has, for my money, the funniest concept of the week.<\/p>\n

That said, I’d probably make a bunch of tweaks to the structure.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe we’re coming back from the show’s last commercial break?<\/p>\n

For the ‘non-lightning’ questions… I’d probably cut that down to just two questions (from four).\u00a0 The made-up novels\/songs are great, but even great summaries start to feel a bit logy after a while.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Once you get to the lightning round, you’re golden.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

“The Game Show”<\/a> is a perfect example of where to start a game-show sketch:\u00a0 in medias res<\/em>.\u00a0 Just skip all the announcer-y setup and get straight to the, er, meat.<\/p>\n

And this was another great blackout sketch.\u00a0 It didn’t widely expand upon the idea of Ted Nugent’s game show, but it didn’t need to.\u00a0 It hit a few great jokes and then stopped.\u00a0 (All I would suggest is a funnier name than “Ted Nugent’s Game Show”, but nothing immediately springs to mind.)<\/p>\n

Well-done, that.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

“Wild Animals: Date or Mate”<\/a> is from a new contributor, E. L. Raica.\u00a0 Again, I’d say to cut through the preamble faster — in medias res<\/em> is your friend.\u00a0 This, too, could do with ‘returning from a commercial break’ instead of ‘starting from the top’.<\/p>\n

Once we get to the animals introducing themselves, then the comedy engine starts humming.\u00a0 Including the amoeba is a stroke of genius:\u00a0 “Asexual and lovin’ it!” is probably the line of the week.\u00a0 Congrats to the newcomer!<\/p>\n

That said, I’d generally look for ways to make this one go a lot faster.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

“Make \u2018Em Pay!”<\/a> has another great concept:\u00a0 contestants competing for chances at revenge against corrupt bank executives.\u00a0 We start in medias res<\/em> (w00t!), and we could get going even faster:\u00a0 Bert doesn’t have to describe the show at the top.\u00a0 In fact, it’s probably funnier if the audience gets to figure it out for themselves.<\/p>\n

In fact, as often happens, I’m trying to find the sketch that’s half as long and twice as funny.<\/p>\n

The pen of executives is funny.\u00a0 Vanessa’s description of what she would do for sixty-two million dollars is funny.\u00a0 The wheel and the drama of the spin are funny.\u00a0 The ‘glutton’ punishment was, to me, disturbing, but I can see people finding it funny.\u00a0 Basically, if you can find the shortest sketch that connects these points, you’ll probably have a funnier sketch.\u00a0 I don’t see anything that really needs cutting, but the whole thing could be streamlined.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

I was pretty happy with my own sketch<\/a> this time around.\u00a0 I mentioned last week<\/a> that “after three weeks of not-exactly-humorous entries, I really need to get back to writing proper sketches again.”\u00a0 I think I accomplished that.\u00a0 The most obvious criticism is that I’m just doing “The X Presidents”<\/a> only with game-show hosts, but I have no shame about stealing from Robert Smigel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I didn’t decide to use this concept until I came up with the James Lipton angle.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I think it’s the same for sketches — when the audience hears a really funny concept for a\u00a0 sketch, they ‘see a free sketch in their heads’.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (This is why improv troupes tend to shy away from inherently funny setups.)<\/p>\n

So with this one, once I had Lipton in place, I knew I was golden.\u00a0 I had something that could surprise the audience and take it beyond the pile of game-show-themed puns I so happily employed.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I couldn’t think of a joke that was really funny, so I just wrote the cheesiest joke I could think of.\u00a0 I guess it works in that context.<\/p>\n

That said, people seem to dig the sketch<\/a>.\u00a0 Hell, it might be my funniest Sketchwar entry since that dating one<\/a> a few months back.\u00a0 I am content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter provides some feedback on the seven sketches submitted for the 3\/6\/09 topic of “Game Shows.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis","tag-game-show"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketchwar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}