A Little More Help with Games and Premises

In last week’s Q&A session, subscriber lumenwrites had this to say:

It would be really amazing if you could write more posts on coming up with sketch ideas, and share more advice on how to come up with the "game" of the scene. I've read the posts you've published before, and they're helpful, but I'm still feeling confused.

When I read your analysis of your sketches (or subscribers' sketches) they make sense to me, I can see the game in them, and I think I understand how it works. But I'm really struggling to come up with the game for a sketch on my own, I find it really difficult for some reason.

I feel like this is the most difficult part of sketch writing. Once you have a good idea for a game (like your Truth or Dare), it feels pretty clear how to escalate the game, turn that into an outline, and to write it. But coming up with the game in the first place still feels really mysterious to me, I just can't do it.

Maybe you could share some tips or exercises that would make it easier to do?

I think this is a fairly common problem. It’s one thing to recognize a game but it’s something else to come up with one yourself. I’ve written on this topic a bit before. This post gets into building a strong game with a point of view, and this post is about coming up with ideas. But I’m hoping to get more specific today, with lots of examples.

Here’s the briefest possible summary of the two posts linked above, if you can’t be bothered to read them: Strong premises come from revealing a surprising truth. The best place to find surprising truths are in your own life. Things that make you strongly emotional are worth a closer look, especially things that are painful, embarrassing, infuriating, or shameful. If something elicited a strong emotion it’s probably because something unexpected happened. That’s a surprise. And it actually happened, so it’s coming from a place of truth. The core of a good idea is in there, even if you have to dig a bit to find it. Now that you know where to look, you should know what you’re looking for. Poke at the moment to see if you can verbalize why it’s funny, or strange, or infuriating. Often this will involve unusual repeated patterns, or the coexistence of contrasts. These are the elements you will be heightening and repeating in the game of your sketch. And that’s the process in a highly reductive nutshell: find something weird and true, identify why it’s weird, repeatedly exaggerate the weird part when you’re writing your sketch.

Okay! That’s vague and confusing! Specifics are always much easier to understand, so I offered to guide lumenwrites through the development of some premises. I asked for a few moments from their life that made them emotional, and a few things they noticed that just seemed unusual. Here’s what they said:

Emotional Moments

- I recently found out that the girl-next-door I had a crush on as a teenager has a 2 year old baby now. And I still don't even feel like a "real grown up". I got good at my job (webdev), but not at relationships. She created a human life, I just created a bunch of websites.

- I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, recently found a new mole, my brain immediately assumed it must be cancer. Got it checked out, it's all fine, but a week from now my ear will get itchy or I'll sneeze too loud, and my brain will assume the worst possible thing again.

- My neighbors are very loud, and I'm too socially awkward to face them and ask them to keep it down. It's easier to suffer through the noise than through an uncomfortable conversation.

Unusual Moments

- I find it weird that due to the current political situation, normally calm and levelheaded people are seriously discussing strategies for surviving a potential nuclear apocalypse.

- Really smart people seem to seriously believe that an Artificial Intelligence will exist in our lifetimes, maybe in the next 10-15 years, and if it does, it's very likely to kill us all, or at least end the world as we know it. What the hell am I supposed to do with this information, how is anything I can think or do be meaningful in the face of that? I'll go play some DnD or try to write a comedy sketch I guess...

- I have learned more from a bunch of $0-$20 online courses than from my $30k Master's degree.

I think all of these have some potential for comedy! And I love that lumenwrites has the natural inclination to explain the emotional moments. It’s a first step toward identifying exactly what is unusual about the situation and finding the comedy in it. So, here’s how I would approach turning these observations into sketch games.

“She created life; I created a bunch of websites”

One reason emotional moments are so great for comedy is that they illuminate feelings many people have, but are afraid to express. By expressing these feelings yourself, you can create a moment of catharsis for everyone else. To use the old cliche: you’re saying what everyone else is thinking. Who hasn’t felt like they’re a big child wearing an adult costume? Who hasn’t jealously compared themself to their friends?

So, it’s relatable, but is it funny? Maybe! Lumenwrites starts to get at something with the line I quoted in the header: “She created life. I created a bunch of websites.” This is the coexistence of contrasts, which is one of the things we should be looking out for.

What I would do at this point is look for a way to make these contrasts as distinct as possible while juxtaposing them as close as we possibly could. Some possibilities:

• Create an unusual world where everyone is treating the launch of a new dumb website like the arrival of a new baby. Your parents are thrilled. Your friends with dumb websites are happy to have people who can relate to them. Everyone agrees this is the most useful way to spend your time. It’s sort of a wish-fulfillment sketch that shows how life isn’t. Like the Far Side comic below. The game is treating web dev like a new baby, but you heighten it by making the web dev stuff more and more frivolous while everyone’s reactions are more and more effusive. This heightening also makes your point of view clearer: these are two acts of creation, but other people care a lot more about babies than work.

What was once a joke is just reality now

• You could also get across this point of view by creating an unusual character. Put a web developer in, say, a lamaze class. He’s very excited about his “baby,” which is the website he’s devoted his life to. You might do some mapping, looking for more similarities between the two contrasting halves. He, too, is nervous there might be something wrong with the site, but won’t know for sure until it’s here. He has also had many sleepless nights preparing. Again, you’re playing with the tension of the contrast: you can make intellectual arguments for why these things are similar, but they feel very different.

• Instead of bringing web development into the world of babies, bring babies into the world of web development. Maybe you have a bunch of developers doing a project update and they all have a mid-life crisis and decide they’ve been wasting their life on work instead of family. You keep the language of web development, but the specifics of raising a child: “What kind of timeline are we looking at?” “Realistically, I’d say launch would be no sooner than nine months from now.” “Can we make it eight? We’re trying to launch before end of Q2.”

• Make it a commercial parody: an ad for an app that becomes not at all about the app, but about how the developers sacrificed their best years to make CatRater, and what was it all for if you don’t download it?

You can see there are a lot of different ways to approach this sketch. Some will probably be more successful than others, but they’re all exploiting a surprising connection between opposites.

“I’m a bit of a hypochondriac”

In this one, what I immediately see, and what you describe, is a pattern of behavior, which is another thing we should always be looking for. Is it enough to just continue and heighten this pattern? Maybe, but I would guess, probably not. This will probably feel predictable because it would boil down to “hypochondriac acts like a hypochondriac.” It’s truthful, but probably not surprising. Recognizing this, I would start looking for a way inject more surprise. The best way to do that is to examine the behavior more. Why is this unusual? What is weird about it to you. This will obviously be different person to person, but that’s what makes your sketch unique. Here are some things that come to mind for me:

• Subvert the pattern: if a pattern isn’t surprising, then disrupt it. Maybe a group of people are laughing about their hypochondriac tendencies in a self-deprecating way. “I could have sworn this mole was cancer, but it turned out to be an old jelly bean that got stuck to me.” Another has their own story. And a third is like, “I handled that glowing rock and now my arm is a mass of pulsating pustules.” And now you have a game where a hypochondriac who clearly has something wrong won’t do anything about it because they’ve just been talking about how they always overreact.

• If you’re a hypochondriac you’re looking for cures for all ailments, but hypochondriasis is itself a condition you might worry about. So maybe you can play a logic game — a commercial parody for a clinic that treats hypochondriasis, but it’s clear in the commercial that this place is clearly exploiting hypochondriacs by making up increasingly fake-sounding diseases. Or maybe a pharmaceutical the claims to cure hypochondriasis itself.

• Here’s another weird thing about being a hypochondriac: if you ever get the satisfaction of being right, that also means something terrible has happened to you. That’s an interesting potential for contrasts — where someone might actually feel happy about getting terrible news. How can we set up a sketch to maximize that contrast? Maybe someone is dying in the hospital and everyone who comes to visit just gets a big “told ya so” speech. Or play into that right/wrong dynamic with a Hypochondriac: The Game Show. Contestants are guessing “is this mole cancer?” and “Why is my throat scratchy?” and no matter how they answer it’s terrible news: they either lose points or learn they have a terrible disease. It’s a miserable game show where no one is having any fun.

Exercises

I picked out just two examples about to show how I would start to approach these, and I invite you to try it out for yourself in the comments. How might you find and exploit a surprising truth from the other kernels listed above? Remember to look for connections between contrasts and unexpected patterns.

Next Open Post

Lumenwrites went on to ask about sketches that aren’t based in reality: those involving sci-fi, fantasy, or horror elements. Even when the reality of the sketch is not our reality the process is basically the same. Nevertheless, we’ll take a closer look at sketches in a speculative world and look at what I think makes them work.