I’m currently at work on two comedic pieces, and so I’ve been quizzing my comedy and sketch friends to see what kind of “book learning” they’d been taught that I could cannibalize.
Most of the stuff I’ve found helpful, but nothing so much as a simple idea that you find a character’s weakness or source of insecurity and hammer it every chance you get. An example: a guy who believes he’s underqualified for his job, and you keep putting him in situations where he’s in danger of everyone else coming to the same conclusion. He twists in the wind and makes implausible excuses, or cleverly bullshits his way out of the trouble… either way, that can elicit the kind of tension that’s funny.
Stuff I’ve found less helpful, but interesting, I picked up second-hand from some of the more respected sketch writing classes. A number of these classes seem to heavily stress a concept called “The Game” of a scene. You find the central “game” of a scene early… let’s say, for example, a girl wants to impress a guy. She does something that deviates from normal behavior to get his attention. Now the game is on, and the goal for the writer is to “heighten” the game. Usually that means having the girl’s behavior (and/or, I suppose, the guy’s reaction) get bigger, wilder, and weirder.
My complaint is that I don’t understand how, if you’re closely following this method, you’re going to avoid writing stuff that becomes absurdist. If the “game” progresses by going bigger, or odder… well, aren’t you just going to wind up with characters that are giant cartoons, every time?
And to answer myself, I just sort of take a look at most of the sketch comedy I see, and a lot of the comedy programs getting made… And it seems like the answer is yes, that’s what you wind up with. Hey, I like some of them… It’s not necessarily a bad thing… but it’s only one type of humor…
Anyway, the two comedy things I’m writing… One’s under wraps, the other’s an animated short film that, with luck, I’ll be able to announce here soon. I always feel like I should keep the details under wraps… this quite probably means blogging about my ongoing/upcoming projects is an ill fit. Yikes. What the hell else do I care enough to talk about?
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You know, just doing a quick search after posting, I notice that it seems like a lot of people within the sketch and improv communities have different opinions on what finding “the game” really means, so I’ll just state right here that my definition of the game is just the one that I imagined I heard. And I suppose I could be wrong in my interpretation. Though I’ll also say that it seems like a lot of people are loathe to come out with a straight definition of the concept.