The Basics #1: What Is A Sketch and How Does It Work?

Today I’m going to talk about some basic, basic, basic stuff. We’re going to cover what a sketch is and how it works. These are important concepts that will lay the foundation for every conversation to follow, and if you’ve ever taken any kind of comedy class, it will bore the hell out of you! Sorry! This post is for beginners, so if you feel like you already know this, go play quietly in the corner or something. For everyone else, buckle up! I’m gonna throw a lot at you.

When I talk about sketch writing, I’m talking about a very specific form. Before we really dig in, I want to be sure we’re all on the same page about what we’re trying to write.

A scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, in which a long-winded professor bores his class, just as I am with this post.

What Is A Sketch?

Here’s my attempt at a general definition:

A sketch is a short, self-contained scene focused on one unusual thing that heightens to comedic absurdity.

If we break this down piece by piece, it should answer a lot of questions you may have as a first-time sketch writer.

Short: How short? 3-5 minutes of performance, or 3-5 pages¹ of script in standard screenplay formatting.²

Self-contained: Sketches are not serialized. They require no knowledge of characters or story outside of what is in the script and in the cultural landscape. It has a beginning and an end. Even if a sketch has recurring characters, the comedy is understandable to a new viewer.

Focused on One Unusual Thing: Sketches are built around a single comedic idea, called a game. This fundamental concept is the topic of the rest of this post, so stay tuned for a lot more on this below. For now, just internalize the idea that sketches are built around a single premise. Not many premises, and not plot. Sketches are distinct from plays, movies, and sitcoms in that they don’t tell a story. We’re not watching characters change or go on incredible adventures. But we’re also not writing meandering conversations of unrelated jokes. Sketches are about taking a single, funny idea and squeezing it until we’ve wrung out every last drop of comedy.

Heightens to Comedic Absurdity: A sketch isn’t a scene of everyday life. It’s larger than life. Reality should be broken, turned on its head, or exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. And a sketch is more than a premise; it builds. The big challenge of sketch writing is sustaining the tension between reality and absurdity over several minutes, without shifting to a new premise or becoming predictable. If you can do this you’ll have a good sketch instead of merely a good sketch idea.

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What is Game?

The game is the single pattern of unusual behavior that is the focus of the sketch. That may seem straightforward enough, but game can be a difficult concept for people to grasp. So, let’s consider some examples. Here’s how I would describe the games³ of a few produced sketches from great sketch shows:

• A passenger in “Boarding Group 1” gets frustrated when he must wait as more and more unexpected groups get to board the plane before he can.

• A pair of casting agents are continually confused by an actor’s monologue that is indistinguishable from the act of auditioning itself.

• A group of women try to prove themselves the best friend of a bride-to-be by gifting her better and better vibrators.

Each of these bullet points describes something unusual that repeatedly affects our characters. Even if you’ve never seen these sketches, you can read these sentences and understand what’s funny about the sketch. You might also be able to imagine what happens after the premise is introduced. In fact, take a moment to do just that. Imagine what might happen in these sketches, based only on their descriptions and then watch the videos below:

“Boarding a Plane Shouldn’t Be This Hard” - Key & Peele

“The Audition” - Mr. Show

“Bridal Shower” - Inside Amy Schumer

Do you see how every moment supports the same repeating idea? The passenger keeps being delayed by ever-stranger boarding groups. The casting agents keep getting confused about what’s real and what’s the audition. The bridal partiers keep one-upping each other with vibrators. This is the game at work.

The Power and Limits of Repetition

So, to recap, something weird happens, and then it keeps happening. Simple enough, but there’s a problem. Repetition breeds predictability and comedy relies on being unpredictable. “But wait,” you might say, “If that’s the case, why are we repeating anything?" How do we create comedy from repetition?”

What we’re ultimately trying to do is create moments where the unexpected meets the inevitable. You want to make moves that are shocking in the moment, but in retrospect couldn’t have happened any other way. This delights the audience because it feels like a magic trick. You’re surprising them with something that was in front of their eyes the whole time! Repetition creates that necessary sense of inevitability.

So if repetition provides the inevitable we need something else to create a sense of unexpectedness. In the Key & Peele sketch, we know more groups will be called to board the plane because that’s all that’s happened the entire sketch. Of course it will keep happening! Your job is to repeat the unusual thing in ways the audience won’t predict. So how do you make repetition unpredictable? The glib answer is “any way you can,” but generally you’ll adjust either HOW you repeat or WHEN you repeat.

Changing How You Repeat

In each beat of the game the unusual behavior should get more exaggerated than the one before it, constantly toeing the limits of credulity. This is heightening. Finding the right pace to heighten is part of the art of sketch writing. Exaggerate too quickly and you’ll have nowhere to go for the rest of the sketch. Heighten too slowly and your audience will be bored.

In the Key & Peele sketch, the groups that board before Group 1 are at first recognizable: first class passengers, reward club members, and people with small children. As the sketch goes on, the groups become more and more unbelievable: groups that exist in real life, but don’t normally get boarding privileges (rabbis, nuns, and imams), groups that don’t exist in real life (old religious people with military babies), and even a specific individual instead of a group (Jason Schwartzman). Each subsequent boarding group is more specific, more ridiculous, and more targeted toward keeping this single passenger from getting on the plane.

Humans are designed to spot patterns, and your audience is (hopefully) made of humans. Once they notice the beats are heightening they’ll start predicting (consciously or subconsciously) what the next beat will be. Those bastards! You went out of your way to surprise them and here they are trying un-surprise themselves. One way to stay unpredictable is with misdirects.

To continue with the Key & Peele example: after a few beats we start to suspect that the passenger will never be able to board. At this point the most unexpected move would be to let him on… but this would also contradict the game, which relies on him NOT boarding. What to do? We can temporarily surprise the audience by giving the passenger a false victory. “Boarding for those with blue suitcases” catches people off guard. It looks like a win for the passenger! It breaks the pattern for just long enough that when the pattern is re-established (“That’s not a suitcase; it’s a computer bag.”) it has the power to surprise again.

Changing When You Repeat

Another way to maintain surprise is by changing when you heighten. A sketch has a natural rhythm. You hit the game, the characters react, you hit the game again, the characters react again, and on and on. Again, the audience will pick up on this pattern and you can keep them on their toes by surprising them in the moments between beats.

One simple way to do this is to simply shorten that time. The audience knows you’re going to heighten, but if it happens sooner than expected, they’ll still be surprised.

Another option is to rest the game and build in more time between beats. If the audience expects a beat and it doesn’t come, then they once again find themselves off balance and ready to be surprised. But you MUST use this extra time for comedy. If you don’t make them laugh, the audience will feel like they’ve gotten ahead of you. These laughs between beats come from exploring.

When we explore we add new details that broaden the world the scene is in. These details are logically consistent with everything that’s been established, but are still unexpected. Consider the moment when the airline attendant thanks the military baby for its service. This isn’t a beat of the game (it’s not a new, strange boarding group), but it supports the world the game is in. It is logically consistent with the character’s previous behavior (thanking military personnel), but also unexpected because a military baby is so ridiculous we expect other characters to be shocked by its existence.

To see how valuable exploring can be, look at the moment where the airline attendant takes a long, slow sip of his coffee. This is a short exploration into that character. How does this guy feel about these ridiculous boarding groups? What does he think of the angry passenger in front of him? Why is he going along with this insanity? These are questions we may start asking ourselves at this point in the sketch. And the answer is he doesn’t care. He’s maybe even a little tickled by this passenger’s frustration. And we understand all that from one deliciously long sip of coffee.

This moment has nothing to do with the boarding groups, but it emotionally supports the game by showing another way the passenger isn’t as important as he thought he was. It also makes the sketch feel more real, suggesting that this world and these characters we see for only an instant have a rich inner life.

Sketches without at least some element of exploration can feel mechanical and predictable. “The Audition” is a tight sketch, that moves from beat to beat at a pretty fast clip. Even still, one of the most memorable moments for me is when the actor (David Cross’s character) says, “It’s a good play” as a justification for how closely it reflects real life. There’s a hint of defeat in his voice that for a moment makes him feel like a real person instead of a ridiculous character. These moments are funny on their own and they let us disguise the pattern of the game so we can keep surprising the audience with it.

Keegan-Michael Key in “Substitute Teacher,” playing another teacher who is ready for an end to all this nonsense

Bringing It All Together

So, your sketch should have an unusual pattern (the game). Every time we revisit the unusual thing, it should get more exaggerated (heightening), and every moment in between should add more logically consistent details (exploring). This structure continually surprises the audience with moments that feel simultaneously unexpected but inevitable, and it is in these moments that comedy lives.

Blecch! That is just about the driest, most soulless way I could possibly describe the joy of a great sketch. But there it is. Again, these concepts are not rules, but tools to help you focus your script and make your comedy as sharp as it can be. This is not an instant formula for sure-fire laughs. You could write a perfectly paced, expertly structured sketch that incorporates all these mechanics and still falls totally flat. And that’s because there’s still one pesky, little problem: your premise might suck.

Next Week…

Does your premise suck? How do you find funny ideas? What makes a game funny and what happens when you build a sketch around one that isn’t?

Optional Exercises

Watch one episode of a sketch show, or a handful of sketches from your favorite outlet.

After the first sketch, see if you can verbalize what the game was in one sentence.

Pause the next sketch at the thirty second mark. Can you identify the game? How would you heighten a sketch with that game? Write down a few beats. Pause again at one minute. Have your thoughts changed at all? Did the sketch progress as you thought it would?

In the next sketch see how quickly you can identify the game.

1. Take it as a given that there are exceptions to everything I say. Some sketches run longer or shorter than this, but 3-5 minutes is a good area to aim for. Shorter than that and you probably left some comedy unexplored; longer, and you’ll start to test people’s patience. There might be good reasons to adjust the length, but if you’re starting, aim for 3-5.

2. I don’t intend to spend any time talking about standard screenplay formatting. Mostly because it’s boring and there are a variety of affordable programs that will format things properly for you. Also some wildly expensive ones if you like throwing money around. Good free options include CelTx and WriterDuet. Good inexpensive options include Highland and FadeIn. Final Draft is the industry standard, but it’s also very pricy. I, personally, mostly use Highland 2 and FadeIn.

3. Admittedly, my game descriptions are often chunkier than most other people’s. Some might simplify these further. You could, for example, describe the game of The Audition as just “an audition piece is indistinguishable from the audition,” but I like to include the emotional impact of the unusual thing. We connect with these sketches because of the reactions the characters have. “Bridal Shower” is about so much more than “weird vibrators” — it’s about one-upsmanship, competition, and gifts as social signifiers. Ultimately, the ability to describe a game is only valuable to help you understand the comedy enough to write and/or pitch a sketch. For me, that means including some character detail. Long or short, you shouldn’t need more than a single sentence to describe the game.