Wow thank you so much for this Mike! I'm brand new, my background is in chemical engineering and I feel like an alien that has touched down and met a really kind local who could describe art and laughter to a graduate of Vulcan University. Helping me understand the mechanics have made sketches playful to me in a surprising way--like when a prism scatters white light into rainbow--you can see all the component parts of what mystified you before. I'm excited for the exercises--I'll be looking with hunting eyes now! So glad I subscribed!
One of the reasons I love Key & Peele is they’re great at heightening. It would have been easy to end the sketch with a quippy line as Keegan boards or the plane gets overbooked. Instead, they take it to the most extreme possible scenario (plane crash) to call back to what seemed like a throwaway joke (Jason Schwartzman). The second scene sticks to the game because it continues to show the unimportance of boarding group one. This sketch shows the importance of milking a premise for all its comedic value.
Slightly related, a lot of Mr. Show sketches seem to do this thing where they end a sketch with a sketch. It’s related to the previous scene but acts like a transition to different sketches. One example is the sketch trio where 1) David Crosby tries to poop on the American flag for performance art but gets nervous and can’t deliver. The sketch ends with Crosby suing the flag, so 2) the court finds a flag expert to take the witness stand, who explains 3) the story of how the American flag was invented. They’re three unrelated sketches that work on their own, but put together have some narrative value. With Mr. Show you can enjoy any given sketch on its own, but their writing make watching a full episode more worthwhile. I don’t think this contradicts what you said about sketches not having narratives, but it adds a different dimension. Does that make sense? What do you think about how Mr. Show ties the premise/game of sketches together?
Your point about the ending of the K&P sketch is spot on. That last "crash" scene is about as heightened as you can get, but still points to the truthful, emotional core of the sketch. This guy thought he was important and he's not.
I like the Mr. Show transitions, and was planning to talk about them when I get to my post on beginnings and endings. Monty Python's Flying Circus does a similar thing. I think at one point one of the Pythons said something to the effect of "endings are hard so we decided not to have them." And that's sort of what a lot of these transitions are -- a way to end the sketch whenever it feels right while still keeping the energy up. And if you're clever about it, those transitions can knit a bunch of sketches together into something that feels like a cohesive whole, which, as you say, adds another dimension. But, crucially, these kinds of transitions aren't necessary to the individual sketches. You can watch any Mr. Show sketch on its own and get the comedy of it. If you're putting together a complete sketch show (on stage or screen) you should absolutely consider how you transition from one to the next, but you don't feel like you HAVE to be this clever.
One other work to consider is "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which is essentially a bunch of sketches tied together with a very loose narrative. You can totally do themed sketch shows and sketch performances like this, and I personally have a real soft spot for them. But all this is probably beyond "the basics."
This was a good read! I'd recognized and talked about a lot of these terms before ("that thing where the ridiculous thing just keeps happening") and heard a few of these terms with enough context that I could sorta follow ("heightening" comes to mind) but it's nice to have a semi-concrete link between the terms and concepts now.
Looking at the sketches you linked, it feels like one could not foresee that the sketch would be good based solely on the script. I feel like the script by itself should be funny, though. Otherwise, what is even the point of a sketch writer ? Won't that make annotating the scripts we send you very hard ?
Well, I might disagree with you a bit here: I DO think you would be able to tell from the script alone that these sketches work, because you're right that the script itself should be funny. But I want to be sure I'm understanding you correctly. Are you saying that you think it's the performances (and not the writing) that make these sketches work, or are you saying that you don't think these sketches work at all? Or are you just skeptical that the comedy would come across on the page through text alone?
I'm skeptical that the comedy comes across well on the page yeah. I feel like, without even talking about ghe quality of acting, but rather the acting choices, and how they tell the jokes, those things are in fact most of it.
I guess all of this can actually be written in the script but talk about scene direction, right ?
The actors in these sketches are all fantastic, and certainly make a lot of great performance choices, but I think what you're likely resonating with is the emotional impact of the game on the characters. And there IS a lot of comedy in these moments, where the weirdness of the game connects with truthful human behavior. I'll have more to say about this next week (on what makes a strong game), and in a later post when I talk about character. But I promise the script would have specified this emotional element either explicitly through stage direction, or implicitly through the lines.
It's hard to illustrate this point without showing you the original scripts, and I unfortunately don't have those for these sketches... but I DO have scripts for a bunch of CollegeHumor videos. We'll have a script dissection coming up soon, but in the meantime if you tell me a few CH sketches you like, I'll see if I can dig up the scripts for any of them. If I can, I'll post a script-to-screen comparison of how it looks on the page and how it looks on the screen.
First thanks for this. It's nice to get some understanding behind the stuff I've learned only by watching comedy for years.
2nd our homework is to... watch TV?! Someone earned their apple for the day. Well not a real apple but maybe one of those NFT apple deals I've heard about.
C) I submitted 2 sketches, and afterwards felt they were on equals in comedic value and sketch writing and after just 1 post I realize how wrong I am. One sketch does all the these things and the other doesn't really. So I've already improved.
In conclusion, do we email our homework to you directly or just post it as a comment?
Great stuff. I just finished recorded a sketch yesterday and this is all stuff I implement but I learned more reading about the little pauses to fill with comedy to heighten surprise. I'm glad I subscribed lol
Great post. I submitted a sketch earlier today just as a way to test myself, and also to have a starting point that I can build and reflect on in the future. It’ll be interesting to see how my approach changes after carrying out the exercises you recommend here.
Yeah, talking about this stuff can sometimes feel heady and unnecessarily academic. As with almost anything the best way to fully understand is to play with these concepts. Try following these guidelines, try breaking them, try looking for them in the things you love.
Reading this, and finding the vocabulary to structure the stuff that a lot of viewers of sketch have internalized, I'm curious how you actively deal with keeping the audience on board with the game when the subject matter becomes more esoteric or academic. British sketch comedy sometimes pulls this trick where the jokes it is making have a lot of academic or historical context but they somehow communicate that context while also making accessible jokes. The one that comes to mind is A Bit of Fry and Laurie's "Treaty of Westphalia". Key & Peele also pull this trick with sports, producing sketches that I still find funny even though I know almost nothing about the sport in question.
I love this question, in part because I actually love these kinds of sketches. The key, for me, is making sure the core comedy comes from a universally understandable place, even if the specifics might be inaccessible. As someone not very well informed in either European history or current European politics I could very well be missing some deeper commentary here, but I can still laugh at a fundamentally funny idea: that an entire country could be forgotten and unwanted. And there's a funny juxtaposition here with the way these characters are talking about huge issues in very petty, familiar ways -- the way you might argue with friends about splitting the bill, or a roommate dispute. That foundation makes the sketch broadly accessible, so even a moron like me can laugh at it, even if I'm missing more detailed and nuanced jokes. There is, for example, a joke about England not opting into the Euro. That joke obviously works best if you understand the context, but can still feel fun on its own as part of the pattern of powerful countries making big decisions in a flippant way.
These types of sketches also illustrate an idea that I think is important: you should always assume your audience smart. I'll have a lot more to say on this topic later, and this comment is probably already too long, so I'll leave you with one last example. The following sketch works best if you're deeply familiar with both philosophy and soccer, but even if you don't know enough about either to pick up all the funny details, you can still laugh at the idea of combining soccer and philosophy in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfduUFF_i1A
Thanks for getting to this late, almost-non-question. I had totally forgotten about International Philosophy. Knowing more than I did the last time I saw it (15 years ago?), it hits even better. Marx being the only one after the score pointing out the practical fact that the score was off sides is brilliant. The game also neatly dovetails with the comedic observation that "both philosophy and soccer consist of mostly nothing happening and then one important thing everyone talks about for decades". Crazy they wrote so much of that show drunk across the street from the studio.
Wow thank you so much for this Mike! I'm brand new, my background is in chemical engineering and I feel like an alien that has touched down and met a really kind local who could describe art and laughter to a graduate of Vulcan University. Helping me understand the mechanics have made sketches playful to me in a surprising way--like when a prism scatters white light into rainbow--you can see all the component parts of what mystified you before. I'm excited for the exercises--I'll be looking with hunting eyes now! So glad I subscribed!
One of the reasons I love Key & Peele is they’re great at heightening. It would have been easy to end the sketch with a quippy line as Keegan boards or the plane gets overbooked. Instead, they take it to the most extreme possible scenario (plane crash) to call back to what seemed like a throwaway joke (Jason Schwartzman). The second scene sticks to the game because it continues to show the unimportance of boarding group one. This sketch shows the importance of milking a premise for all its comedic value.
Slightly related, a lot of Mr. Show sketches seem to do this thing where they end a sketch with a sketch. It’s related to the previous scene but acts like a transition to different sketches. One example is the sketch trio where 1) David Crosby tries to poop on the American flag for performance art but gets nervous and can’t deliver. The sketch ends with Crosby suing the flag, so 2) the court finds a flag expert to take the witness stand, who explains 3) the story of how the American flag was invented. They’re three unrelated sketches that work on their own, but put together have some narrative value. With Mr. Show you can enjoy any given sketch on its own, but their writing make watching a full episode more worthwhile. I don’t think this contradicts what you said about sketches not having narratives, but it adds a different dimension. Does that make sense? What do you think about how Mr. Show ties the premise/game of sketches together?
Your point about the ending of the K&P sketch is spot on. That last "crash" scene is about as heightened as you can get, but still points to the truthful, emotional core of the sketch. This guy thought he was important and he's not.
I like the Mr. Show transitions, and was planning to talk about them when I get to my post on beginnings and endings. Monty Python's Flying Circus does a similar thing. I think at one point one of the Pythons said something to the effect of "endings are hard so we decided not to have them." And that's sort of what a lot of these transitions are -- a way to end the sketch whenever it feels right while still keeping the energy up. And if you're clever about it, those transitions can knit a bunch of sketches together into something that feels like a cohesive whole, which, as you say, adds another dimension. But, crucially, these kinds of transitions aren't necessary to the individual sketches. You can watch any Mr. Show sketch on its own and get the comedy of it. If you're putting together a complete sketch show (on stage or screen) you should absolutely consider how you transition from one to the next, but you don't feel like you HAVE to be this clever.
One other work to consider is "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which is essentially a bunch of sketches tied together with a very loose narrative. You can totally do themed sketch shows and sketch performances like this, and I personally have a real soft spot for them. But all this is probably beyond "the basics."
This was a good read! I'd recognized and talked about a lot of these terms before ("that thing where the ridiculous thing just keeps happening") and heard a few of these terms with enough context that I could sorta follow ("heightening" comes to mind) but it's nice to have a semi-concrete link between the terms and concepts now.
Thanks for this !
Looking at the sketches you linked, it feels like one could not foresee that the sketch would be good based solely on the script. I feel like the script by itself should be funny, though. Otherwise, what is even the point of a sketch writer ? Won't that make annotating the scripts we send you very hard ?
Well, I might disagree with you a bit here: I DO think you would be able to tell from the script alone that these sketches work, because you're right that the script itself should be funny. But I want to be sure I'm understanding you correctly. Are you saying that you think it's the performances (and not the writing) that make these sketches work, or are you saying that you don't think these sketches work at all? Or are you just skeptical that the comedy would come across on the page through text alone?
I'm skeptical that the comedy comes across well on the page yeah. I feel like, without even talking about ghe quality of acting, but rather the acting choices, and how they tell the jokes, those things are in fact most of it.
I guess all of this can actually be written in the script but talk about scene direction, right ?
The actors in these sketches are all fantastic, and certainly make a lot of great performance choices, but I think what you're likely resonating with is the emotional impact of the game on the characters. And there IS a lot of comedy in these moments, where the weirdness of the game connects with truthful human behavior. I'll have more to say about this next week (on what makes a strong game), and in a later post when I talk about character. But I promise the script would have specified this emotional element either explicitly through stage direction, or implicitly through the lines.
It's hard to illustrate this point without showing you the original scripts, and I unfortunately don't have those for these sketches... but I DO have scripts for a bunch of CollegeHumor videos. We'll have a script dissection coming up soon, but in the meantime if you tell me a few CH sketches you like, I'll see if I can dig up the scripts for any of them. If I can, I'll post a script-to-screen comparison of how it looks on the page and how it looks on the screen.
Wow. I wasn't aiming for that but I'll take it !
*A few hours later* Finding sketches that underlined this was too hard so here's just my favourite sketches from CH (of which I was able to think !)
Don't eat the laundry pods (surprise !)
Hardly working : Soda Prank (man, I loooove this one)
What going back to the 90s would actually be like
The guy who over pronounces foreign words
Fart martyr
CAMP : Boys vs Girls
Batman vs The penguin
A proper revenge fantasy (the Britishes)
Everyday acting: seeing an ex
My sunburn will turn into a tan
Too good at CPR
The guy who always talks about hot girls
Hardly working : Sensual Harassment (with Amy Schumer)
The guy who's definitely not keeping your secret
Everything wrong with trendy restaurants
Otherwise, thanks for this. The things you plan on talking about will surely address this.
Okay, I'm gonna get a little bonus post on one of these in the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!
First thanks for this. It's nice to get some understanding behind the stuff I've learned only by watching comedy for years.
2nd our homework is to... watch TV?! Someone earned their apple for the day. Well not a real apple but maybe one of those NFT apple deals I've heard about.
C) I submitted 2 sketches, and afterwards felt they were on equals in comedic value and sketch writing and after just 1 post I realize how wrong I am. One sketch does all the these things and the other doesn't really. So I've already improved.
In conclusion, do we email our homework to you directly or just post it as a comment?
If you're a paying member, you shoulda received a mail during last week with submission links.
I did. I submitted two of them. I was kidding about sending him homework.
Oops sorry I'm clueless
All good. Sarcasm doesn't come through as well online as it should.
Great stuff. I just finished recorded a sketch yesterday and this is all stuff I implement but I learned more reading about the little pauses to fill with comedy to heighten surprise. I'm glad I subscribed lol
Great post. I submitted a sketch earlier today just as a way to test myself, and also to have a starting point that I can build and reflect on in the future. It’ll be interesting to see how my approach changes after carrying out the exercises you recommend here.
Yeah, talking about this stuff can sometimes feel heady and unnecessarily academic. As with almost anything the best way to fully understand is to play with these concepts. Try following these guidelines, try breaking them, try looking for them in the things you love.
Reading this, and finding the vocabulary to structure the stuff that a lot of viewers of sketch have internalized, I'm curious how you actively deal with keeping the audience on board with the game when the subject matter becomes more esoteric or academic. British sketch comedy sometimes pulls this trick where the jokes it is making have a lot of academic or historical context but they somehow communicate that context while also making accessible jokes. The one that comes to mind is A Bit of Fry and Laurie's "Treaty of Westphalia". Key & Peele also pull this trick with sports, producing sketches that I still find funny even though I know almost nothing about the sport in question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-WO73Dh7rY
I love this question, in part because I actually love these kinds of sketches. The key, for me, is making sure the core comedy comes from a universally understandable place, even if the specifics might be inaccessible. As someone not very well informed in either European history or current European politics I could very well be missing some deeper commentary here, but I can still laugh at a fundamentally funny idea: that an entire country could be forgotten and unwanted. And there's a funny juxtaposition here with the way these characters are talking about huge issues in very petty, familiar ways -- the way you might argue with friends about splitting the bill, or a roommate dispute. That foundation makes the sketch broadly accessible, so even a moron like me can laugh at it, even if I'm missing more detailed and nuanced jokes. There is, for example, a joke about England not opting into the Euro. That joke obviously works best if you understand the context, but can still feel fun on its own as part of the pattern of powerful countries making big decisions in a flippant way.
These types of sketches also illustrate an idea that I think is important: you should always assume your audience smart. I'll have a lot more to say on this topic later, and this comment is probably already too long, so I'll leave you with one last example. The following sketch works best if you're deeply familiar with both philosophy and soccer, but even if you don't know enough about either to pick up all the funny details, you can still laugh at the idea of combining soccer and philosophy in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfduUFF_i1A
Thanks for getting to this late, almost-non-question. I had totally forgotten about International Philosophy. Knowing more than I did the last time I saw it (15 years ago?), it hits even better. Marx being the only one after the score pointing out the practical fact that the score was off sides is brilliant. The game also neatly dovetails with the comedic observation that "both philosophy and soccer consist of mostly nothing happening and then one important thing everyone talks about for decades". Crazy they wrote so much of that show drunk across the street from the studio.