Questions for Brennan Lee Mulligan
Talking about making the straight man funny
Hey everyone!
Our next guest on Chuffah is Brennan Lee Mulligan! You might know Brennan from his CollegeHumor sketches, and even if you never watched CH videos you might remember his sketch we dissected in an earlier post. Brennan has taught and performed at the UCB, is the creator and DM of Dimension 20, and author of the comic Strong Female Protagonist.
Our conversation will be about the straight man in sketches: when you need them, when you don’t, and how to write them in a way that actually makes them funny. If you have questions for Brennan (either on or off-topic), leave them below and we’ll cover a few of them at the end of our conversation!
Hello again, Brenan's the ceo series started off as a character study in the straight man. And I think all of them have this kind of slow burn to insanity as the game. My question is when writing the straightman how do you gauge how to ratchet up those reactions to give you somewhere left to go afterward? And do you essentially write the straight man after your game to pace yourself?
Hi Brennan, huge fan of your whole deal. For the CEO sketch series, how aligned do you see your character with the general audience? With the moviepass sketch for instance, the audience feels badly but doesn't necessarily relate to him on an intellectual level. Could the formula work with a ceo wholly hostile/oppositional to the audience?