Get Weird

Having fun with rule-breaking

I’ve written a lot about following the rules of sketch, so here’s a post about breaking them.

Rules are comforting, especially when you’re writing your first sketches. They are the sign posts guiding you through the terrifying expanse of the blank page. But if you repeatedly walk the same path, you’ll lose the feeling of unexpectedness that is essential for good comedy.

The Importance of Weirdness

When I was at CollegeHumor, we would occasionally have positions open for new writers. As part of the review process I read hundreds of sketches to help choose the one or two people who would ultimately be hired. Here’s how things usually shook out.

Ten percent of the submitted packets were immediately rejected. These submissions didn’t follow directions, relied on overdone ideas, or were simply “not good.”¹ Another ten percent were on the other end of spectrum: top-of-the-line, high-quality laugh-out-loud sketches. And that eighty percent in the middle? You might guess these were average sketches, but most of those other sketches were better than average. Most submissions were good — structurally sound, technically-proficient sketches with clear games. So what separated the huge mass of good sketches from the tiny sliver great ones?

It wasn’t that the good sketches had flaws, it was that the great sketches had something more. They had a dash of weirdness, a sense of daring. You got the impression that the writers were pushing limits, experimenting. Those dashes of weirdness let us see the writer behind the words — and that was a million times more interesting than a technically perfect, but perfectly boring sketch.

Getting a little weird could be the difference between landing a job or getting lost in the the eighty percent of good-but-forgettable scripts.

Rules for Breaking the Rules

Does the idea of abandoning the rules fill you with dread? First, hello fellow Type-A asshole! Second, you can take some comfort in knowing you can break the rules in a controlled, systematic way.

For me, the best way to “get weird” is to break only one rule in any given sketch. If the rest of your sketch is flawless it makes the “wrong” element of your writing seem like an interesting choice instead of a mistake.²

Push against the structures of sketch to see how much stress they can take. There’s lots of different ways to do this. Here are a few possibilities:

Length

Maybe you’ve gotten used to writing tight, three-minute sketches. Consider how an idea might have a different impact by being very short…

Or, what creative choices you might have to make an incredibly long sketch interesting:

Number of Characters

Maybe you’ve gotten used to having an unusual character, a straight character, and an enabler in a sketch. How could you blow this up? Is there fun to a sketch with fifty characters? Or just a single character deliverying a monologue. The sketch below could have been played as a back-and-forth between two characters, but there’s a thrilling energy that comes from making it a single, uninterrupted speech from one character:

Time Between Beats

How much time do you have between beats? Can you push the limits of tension and silence, getting laughs out of anticipating the next beat? Or you could go in the opposite direction with a list sketch. List sketches are exactly what they sound like: whole sketches composed of one long list. In a well-executed list sketch, each item is a perfect beat of the game either heightening or misdirecting with every single line. There is zero time between beats — it’s all game, all the time. This means that it’s both difficult to do well, and unforgettable when you do.

Subgames and Side Jokes

Perhaps the simplest and most common way to get a little weird with your sketches is to push against the idea that the game should be the only source of comedy in your sketch. A single game should be your main focus, but you can and should have other jokes in your script. Look specifically at reactions and exposition. Are these lines totally flat? Is there a way to add a laugh? Look, too, at the way you introduce each beat. Are you relying on the mere existence of the beat to carry the comedy, or is it worded in a way to maximize surprise?

In the sketch below, look how much care is taken in each individual line to be as specific and funny as possible, even lines between beats, and lines that establish basic information:

Don’t Shy Away from Stupid

Almost all of my most popular sketches started with me passing out a script and telling the room, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever written.” Now I steer toward that. If I start to wonder if the thing I’m writing is too weird, too niche, too off-putting, I simultaneously reassure myself that I’m on the right path. If it’s interesting to me, it’ll probably be interesting to someone else.

Think about all the elements in a sketch: genre, tone, repetition, surprise. Think about how you might venture out of your comfort zone with any of these elements. How might you push your limits? Can you push a sketch to its breaking point and stop at the last possible moment?

Will your weird idea always work? No! Absolutely not. But you might find it’s more fun to fail spectacularly than to succeed forgettably. And if your weird experiment works, then you’ll be rewarded with a truly remarkable piece of writing.

1. To use the technical term

2. And I’m sure this rule itself could be challenged.