8 Tips for Performing Sketch

A few weeks ago subscriber, AK, had this comment:

This was a topic I had planned to hit, but my original intent was to do an interview with, well, a better actor. Truth be told, and despite what you may read in the flattery above, I don’t consider myself a great actor. A passable actor, maybe. I can get the job done. So I wasn’t sure I would have anything worthwhile to say on the subject.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I have at least a couple of tips, and perhaps acting thoughts from an untrained-but-somehow-professional actor might be useful to untrained-but-aspiring-to-be-professional actors. I’ll still want to chat with one of the many better actors I’ve worked with for some future post, but here are some basic tips.

None of this really gets into the art of acting, a topic that is much too broad for one post. This is more mechanical stuff. Things to help those of you who are acting because no one else is going to be in your sketches and you suddenly have a lot to figure out.

1. Rehearse

Obvious, right? But you still might not be doing it enough because all the time and the planning and coordinating all those schedules and uggggghhh. Rehearsals can be a drag, but they’re so, so worth it. In my experience most performances don’t get good until the actors know the scene so well that the stuff they worried about in the first rehearsal are now completely second nature. The lines and the blocking should be nearly muscle memory. When you’re at the point where everyone can improvise away from the script and then improvise their way back, that’s when things start getting good. Usually you won’t have the luxury of this many rehearsals, but every one makes you a tiny bit better, so take as much as you can get.

2. Aim For Improv

Okay, first: most improv is completely unusable. You should always be sure you have enough coverage of the sketch as it was scripted because if you’re relying on improv to make everything work, you’re going to be very disappointed. But, when improv does works, it’s often the best moment in the whole sketch. It will usually be a moment that forces everyone into natural reactions, a moment we’re always aiming for: surprising but truthful. Use it if you find it. But even if you never discover that moment of improv gold, aiming for improv will force you into a lot of rehearsals, which will only make everyone’s performance better (see #1).

3. Know the Medium

Are you performing this sketch on the stage or on the screen? Take advantage of the performance choices each medium allows. On stage you can really play with silence (because these fuckers can’t click away), and space (because you’ve got a whole room to play in). Stunt and spectacle play better than they would on screen too because, wow, they’re happening live! On screen you can play with smaller expressions, and get jokes out of framing and depth. And if your sketch is going on the internet everything’s about speed. This is as true of the acting as it is the writing and editing. Don’t linger, because you can’t.

4. Know the Shot

This only applies to video sketches, but you should know what the shot looks like. If it’s a close shot, you can play a lot of comedy with more subtle choices: a glance, an eyebrow raise, a blink, etc. That stuff won’t play in a wide shot… but your body will, so make sure you figure that out for the wide. You also don’t want to blow all your energy in a wide shot, and then be worn out in your close-up. Of course, you still need to be consistent with your performance, but knowing the shot will help you be sure the camera is getting everything it needs.

5. Know What You’re Doing

Watch your performances. Yes, it sucks. I’m sorry. You’ll notice all kinds of things you didn’t even realize you were doing. Why are you standing like that? Why are you inflecting all your lines like that? What are your eyes doing? These are little things that you will care about and it will make watching your performances absolutely miserable, but it will make your next performance better. You’ll also get a better sense of how “big” your acting actually is. You might have thought you were big and broad, only to see your performance is much smaller than you thought. Or maybe you thought you were being grounded, only to find a living cartoon upon review. You might also notice you’ve really put on a few pounds lately, and, apparently there’s nothing the editors can do about that (or so they say). To this day, there’s nothing I hate more than reviewing cuts that I’m in, but I have to acknowledge it’s still helping me improve. What a god damn drag.

6. Know What Your Character is Doing

This is really basic stuff, but it’s something missing from a lot of performances in self-produced sketches. Know what your character was doing before the scene starts and what their goal is in the scene. If your scene starts with a character sitting and staring off into space… that looks deeply unsettling! People rarely sit and do nothing. People also rarely just talk at each other. We’re usually doing something else at the same time: eating, drinking, working, picking lint off of ourselves if we’re bored, picking lint off of someone else if we’re flirting, looking for someone we know if we’re trying to escape a conversation, and on and on. Figure these things out for your character. What action would make sense for them that may not be explicitly written in the script? And if you feel like giving yourself some random bit of business is cheating, remember it’s good enough for Brad Pitt, who eats in almost every movie he’s in: