Cofilmic Sketch in the City

What is it? A monthly live showcase of new sketch writing. Currently limited to writers in the North of England. Submit your 3 minute, three character sketch and maybe it’ll get performed.

Will it help my career?

The best of the crop, selected from each night, will be submitted for the COFILMIC Comedy Film Festival live sketchwriting competition on 29th October 2012. A panel of top industry experts (as
well as the audience) will vote for their favourite and the winner will have their sketch made into a short film for the following years competition!

You never know…

Link: Cofilmic Sketch in the City

The Treason Show

What is it? A slick and irreverent satirical topical comedy sketch show, based on the news and current affairs. Written by a team of over 40 writers and performed by a team of multi-talented satirical sketch performers.

Will it help my career? Can’t hurt.

Link: Treason Show Writers Guidelines

Newsrevue

What is it? Newsrevue is a weekly, fast-paced show of hilarious sketches and songs based on absolutely anything in the news—politics, sport, celebrities—from The Lords to Lords, from the Middle East’s Jordan to the Sun’s Jordan.

Will it Help my career?

Over the years, the show has won the Fringe First Award and a Perrier nomination in Edinburgh, won rave reviews from the national press, recorded many TV & radio specials and helped begin the careers of Rory Bremner, Michelle Collins, Josie Lawrence & Bill Bailey.

So… perhaps!

Link: Newsrevue writers page.

Where Else Can I Find Out About Opportunities?

It’s as well to keep an eye out on the BBC Writersroom, in case a show like Newsjack is seeking sketches.

Also the Writing Opportunities section on the British Comedy Guide forums will often flag up interesting stuff.

Basically, though, if you can somehow take control of your own sketches, by joining or starting up a sketch group, doing live shows, making short films, anything that gets your writing off the page and into a form that can be experienced rather than read, you’ll find your own voice much quicker, and you’ll have sketches to show people, which is always a step up from having sketches for people to read.

Do it yourself! Punk rock! Revolution! Seize the means of production! Or write a funny song about how fat John Prescott is for NewsRevue. Whichever you’d prefer.

So I’m going to write a sitcom, and I’m bunging my very important internet research (not time wasting or procrastinating, no) up here. Today I’m looking at the characters. I really want to create an ensemble that works dramatically and comedically. Help!

Here’s Dan Harmon on creating characters:

Write your pilot before you know everything about these people. Let the story establish little pieces of them, don’t fill your script with facts about fictional strangers, fill your script with things happening to fictional strangers. Bring the atoms into collision and let your audience get glimpses of their nuclei as they repulse, neutralize and bond with each other. If you are capable of knowing exactly who these people are by the end of your pilot, you are probably writing a bad TV show. The good news being, I predict much success for you.
But if your goal is to create a TV character with depth, it’s the same as if your goal were to create a tree with height: you’ll have to be patient and surrender a lion’s share of your control. God doesn’t make a tree with hammer and nails. He makes a seed. Likewise, actors and audiences and time are the things that are going to give your characters depth, the best you can do as the writer of a pilot is provide the reader with evidence of that potential.

Mitch Hurwitz on the genesis of Arrested Development:

Someone told me once about this paradigm that exists: matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown. It’s this quartet that resonates through history and popular culture, and you can find it as a diagram in everything from The Beatles to ‘Leave It To Beaver’ to ‘Seinfeld’. In The Beatles, you can kind of see it the clearest. You know, Paul is the matriarch, John is the patriarch, the craftsman is George and the clown is Ringo. So I wanted to get that in there, and I thought, “Maybe that will be the four kids. I’ll do a show about four kids.” As it turns out, Michael and Lindsay would be the matriarch and patriarch. The craftsman, to me, is Buster, because he’s a scholar and he’s serious, and the clown is Gob, because he’s a magician, and clowns literally are magicians. [Laughs.] Oh, there are some magical clowns out there. But I don’t want to make this an advertisement for clowns.

There’s an interesting breakdown of archetypal sitcom characters over at TV Tropes.

It is important to note that, unlike the Five-Man Band, it isn’t strictly necessary for each show to have a representative member for each archetype. Keep in mind that, just as in Real Life, the world of Sit Coms is awash in many various and diverse personalities, of which this is hardly an exhaustive list; so there’s no need to shoehorn characters into these categories. Some shows will utilize certain archetypes and leave out others, or may have characters who don’t fit into any of the listed types.

Of course, even when dealing with archetypes, it’s important to remember, as Garry Shandling puts it (when describing a Hank Kingsley character moment)

Everybody’s stupid, everybody’s smart. Everybody’s bumbling, everybody’s intelligent… We’re all different things at different times.

And that’s when your characters become human, I suppose.

Heavy Petting are now the official sketch group of Casa Bellini Burlesque. Here we are shouting at the audience, while the audience sit back imagining that at some point we will be taking our clothes off. Which we don’t do. Thus: humour.

It was a top night, and we’ll be back with our nipples artfully covered at the Peoples’ Theatre in September. Saucy!

If I could live my life over again, I would post about this before it happened rather than after. Ah, hindsight. Anyway, the lovely AJ and Rebecca of Peg Powler asked if I’d do some pictures for this, and I did, and they stuck the one of the cow to a wall at ARC. There were some other beautiful MSterpieces in the exhibition, too, by the likes of Gus Hughes and Bob Fischer. I think maybe they’ll be up for the next couple of weeks so if you get a chance go look.

MSPainting is fun and I might do some more. Just so you know.

“Yeah,” he said, and the crowd of grateful peasants, kings and pretty girls cheered.

He kicked it again, for the want of anything else useful to do, and the crowd cheered again.

His birthmark itched, the one on his swordarm, the one shaped like a dead dragon. He watched the birthmark fade.

“Huzzah! You shall marry a pretty girl,” bellowed King Umbert, a bearded barrel of a monarch and the crowd cheered once again. “A princess! You shall have everything promised to you, and you shall never want for anything ever again. The pretty girls of our kingdom are well versed in the homemaking arts, and are,” he patted his belly, “good at cakes.”

“Great, thank you,” said Gareth. He looked down at the dragon. It was huge, and ugly, and had taken a lifetime to track down and kill. It was the last of its breed.

An unfamiliar itch started on his right arm: a new birthmark, shaped like a man in an armchair, kicking back, taking it easy. A new birthright.

“You won’t be needing this,” said Humbert, taking the blood-streaked Dread Sword of Destiny from Gareth. “We’ll frame it or something. Would you like some cake?”

“Cake,” said Gareth, and he kicked the dragon. And kicked it again, harder.

“Get up you bastard! Get up! I’m not finished!”

******
Gareth Beats The Dragon by Harris
more tiny tales

INVERSION

Up is down, black is white, dogs and cats living together… Inversion sketches present a character or situation behaving the opposite to what we might expect. For characters, this will often be an inversion of status: a childish judge, an over-emotional nightclub bouncer, a Tory MP with a human heart (satire).

MISDIRECTION / PULL BACK AND REVEAL

Best kept short. An example would be a CSI-type set up, with experts gathered around an unseen “corpse” talking about signs of burning, teeth marks, spatter patterns etc – THEY’RE ONLY LOOKING AT A PIZZA! LOL!

EXAGGERATION

An exaggeration sketch will take a recognisable situation and distort it via exaggeration. Possibly I didn’t need to write that.

DISPLACEMENT

A sketch in which we take a character and put them in a completely inappropriate/unexpected environment. Prince Philip on Pointless, Bear Grylls on a perfume counter (ooh, that’s good, I might use that).

ANACHRONISM

A sketch in which characters/situations shouldn’t be together as they belong in different eras – Henry VIII having to deal with a chugger, or Hitler signing on (don’t do this one). Or Armstrong and Miller’s WW2 Fighter Pilots – the look is one era, the dialogue is another. Random.

THE ESCALATOR

Escalator sketches start off sensible and then ramp up the absurdity until they end up being completely silly/surreal. See Python’s Four Yorkshiremen boasting who had the worst childhood, or the dirty knife sketch.

PARODY

See Scary Movie. Or rather don’t. See French and Saunders’ movie parody sketches, or anything John Culshaw does. Or, again, don’t see those. Let’s avoid parody.

THE LIST / REPETITION SKETCH

Pick a topic, load up wikipedia, you’re away.

I’M WITH STUPID

There’s this normal character, right, and then there’s this not-normal character. And the normal character reacts to the not-normal one. A classic sketch ensues.

REFRAMING

A sketch which relocates an activity. General election in Narnia.

THE WORLD’S WORST

Think of a job or activity. Think of the very worst person who could be doing it. Write that.

X-RAY / HANG A LANTERN SKETCH

Highlighting the absurdity of a character or situation by having the characters point it all out. Can also include “meta sketches” – sketches which are about themselves. Clever.

That’s probably enough taxonomising of comedy for now. But if you can think of any other categories, or better examples than the ones I’ve got, let me know and I’ll see about updating the list.

Well, we’ve just booked outselves a run at the Edinburgh Fringe 2012.

August 16th-26th, 11.05pm at The Alcove, Bar 50.

It’s going to be messy.

The award-winning* Heavy Petting will make you laugh your socks off (bring spares) with their sketches, jokes and faces. An hour of relentless hilarity – your sides will ache, then split, then catastrophically and irreversibly rupture. You’ll be wishing for a dull moment THAT WILL NEVER COME as you try to stop your kidneys sliding out of the side of you.

Between them Heavy Petting have written or made stuff for BBC2 (Shooting Stars), BBC3 (Comedy Shuffle), Radio 4 (The Wondermentalist Cabaret), Dave (Totally Viral) and Take Hart (a painting of a fish).

Heavy Petting: we smell funny. It’s a start.

*25 Metres Crawl, Best Chutney (Hot) and Blue Peter badge (gold).

See you there!

Pic: Hughes. Scientific study: Harris

Words: Harris. Pic: Hughes.

Every little helps.