Things I hate about (some) sketches…….

OK for selling fried food, less so for comedy

There are some topics which should be made illegal as material for sketches.

TV SENDUPS Nothing reveals a lack of imagination and courage more than TV comedians relying on their own medium to get easy laughs. I’ll rephrase that: the writing’s easy, the laughs come damn hard. With all the topics in the universe out there for writers to look to to create hilarity, turning to the nearest thing at hand is just lazy.

I was looking forward to the recent series of Anna and Katy.  Talented performers, but I’m sorry to say they gave me a headache. Nearly every sketch was a games show, TV chef, panel show or soap opera spoof…..and a take-off of “The Apprentice”. In every office across the country, people do send-ups of Lord Sugar’s hapless contestants. Do we need yet another on TV?

COSTUME DRAMA SPOOFS   Yes, we know that Jane Austen characters talk in a slightly stilted way and are absolutely hilarious when they fiddle with their parasols and call all the men “Mr”.  That’s the trouble: we know. We want sketches to surprise us.

PEOPLE DRESSED UP AS ANIMALS  Often, about half way through the series, when the ideas are beginning to flag, someone in the team says “Wouldn’t it be funny if we dressed up as poodles?” People are interesting. Dogs are boring. People dressed up as dogs are desperate.

Writing comedy can be tough.  A sketch which seemed brilliant and fresh when you wrote it at midnight can look stale and clichéd at 10.30am. The stress and adrenalin involved in being funny can cloud your judgement of your work.  Ernest Hemingway spoke of his inner bullshit detector. Developing one of these is nearly as important as building your self-belief.

Why Square Pegs are Good for You

It can be tough finding comedy ideas, or any writing ideas, for that matter. I’ve been reading Stephen King’s marvellous book “On Writing” in which he tells how some of his best ideas came in the shower, while driving, while shaving… Unfortunately the poor comedy writer, labouring to drum up 6 sketch ideas within a 72 hour deadline, doesn’t have the time (or the money for the water bill) You need to create ideas cold, while you’re sitting by your laptop on a bleak Thursday morning.

One of my favourite ways of getting your brain to stand up, comedy-wise, is to think of square pegs - people in a situation they weren’t built for and can’t handle. Many great sketches were built on this situation. First of all, jot down a list of professions.

Such as: Undertaker. Surgeon. Supermodel. Tour Guide. Dentist. Submarine Captain. Doctor’s receptionist…. Write down at least 20 of them.

Now jot down adjectives for human characteristics: Happy. Lecherous. Negative. Monosyllabic. Overfamiliar. Boring... Do 20 of these.

Write them in columns. What you do now is mix and mismatch. How about a negative tour guide? Tour guides are meant to be enthusiastic. How about one who’s very negative,  and puts down all the lovely sights. What would happen? How would the tourists react? When someone doing a job has all the wrong attributes for it, you’re creating tension and conflict, the staples of comedy.

Or an overfamiliar doctor’s receptionist? The cliché is that of the forbidding, frosty gatekeeper. But if she (it’s always a she, for some reason) is a chatterbox who tries to elicit your symptoms while she shares hers with you and the rest of the room, you’re breaking a mould and creating embarrassment and anxiety. And if you don’t think these two emotions are wonderful comedy subjects, then go back to your office desk.

These lists aren’t mechanical. They stoke your creativity to help you write sketches, stories and articles. Good luck with them.

REWRITING

A quote from Richard Curtis: “When I’m advising people about writing, I say that the biggest hurdle you have to get over is how bad your own writing is.”  What he’s talking about is that first draft. So much of the time, after sweating blood over the first few pages or thousand words, when you read them they seem rubbish.

I still feel nervous when I start something new. I know it’s going to be clumsy and feeble, overlong, unfunny, lacking in any kind of elegance. The first draft pain never goes away. It’s even worse with comedy, with that immediate judgement hovering over you: “It’s not funny!”

The second draft remains hard labour. The idea still seems flabby, every word wrong. I feel sometimes as if I’m patching up the Titanic. Often it’s just willpower that keeps me toiling. I bet this is the same for most writers.

I think the best way to get through this is to stop thinking of each draft as being discrete, as a distinct stage. The process from the conception in your head to the finished piece is a continuum. It moves forward extremely slowly, incrementally, and the improvement in the quality of writing is imperceptible.  I try now to think of the first few words or images in my head as being the first draft.  Typing them up is a chore that has to be done. The second draft may be started in my sleep, on the train, or through an altered word on my PC. There are probably hundreds of drafts, all tiny steps forward.

Thinking of it like this removes a lot of pressure and some of the pain. If you set yourself a fixed number of stages, say five, and find that stage three is still no good, you’re going to be stressed.

I often spend about 20 minutes reworking something, move onto another project and come back later for another half hour. It’s more like chipping slowly at a piece of stone, revealing the statue bit by bit.

I hadn’t meant to go on so long about me. Back to Richard Curtis: “After you’ve been writing for a while, you know that when you get a finished film, that’ll be one-thirtieth of what you wrote on the subject. You mustn’t torture yourself with the fact that most of every day is spent writing stuff that’s not great. It’s basically all rewriting. Most of the process is to do with rewriting rather than writing.”

The quotes are from “Now That’s Funny” by David Bradbury and Joe McGrath, a fascinating book of interviews with comedy writers.

Why Writing Sketches is Good For You

There seem to be a lot of disillusioned comedy writers out there. I’ve heard people talk about the glory days of the 1990s, when Hale & Pace, Smith & Jones and Weekending, not to mention loads of European shows, were gasping for material. It’s all gone tits up, I’ve heard say. No one wants comedy writers any more, especially sketch writers.  

I’d like to correct this negativity. First of all, there are opportunities out there, not least Newsjack. There’s always a competition running (for example the Cofilmic Comedy Sketch competition currently advertised in the BBC Writersroom).  There’s a mini-boom in sketch comedy on the standup circuit –  get up and do some of your stuff, or get to know some performers. Think how The League of Gentlemen started off. And why not get a camera and put your stuff on youtube… Not all of this will make you much money, but you never know what it may lead to.

Apart from anything else, though, writing sketches is good for you as a writer, giving you skills like no other genre. Sketches teach you

Brevity  No other narrative art form makes you get to the point quite like the sketch. You’ve got two minutes – often one minute – in which to set up the idea, get it running and resolve it. Compression is key. If you want to write magazine articles or short stories, this ability gives you a head start.

Scattergunning ideas  Sketch writing trains your brain to come out with a flow of ideas, test run them in your head and turn the strong ones into finished pieces. I’ve met captains of industry who moaned about their executives’ difficulty in doing this.

Lateral thinking  The classic technique of juxtaposing inappropriate things, twisting situations and looking through an unaccustomed lens, is one which often passes more literary and “serious” writers by. By chucking together two things which shouldn’t be, as you’ve been doing with your sketches, you can get ideas for stories or add zip to your novel. It’s certainly helped me to come up with humorous article ideas.

Sketches are low-commitment  You can write sketches in between your other projects – sitcoms, novels, memoirs. You’ll refresh your mind and hone your skills. And it’s fun!

So don’t give up on your sketch writing. And if you’re just starting off – keep it going!

The Wright Way - or the Wrong Way?

The world can't get it together to stop the Syrian conflict or halt global warming, but everyone seems to be united in hatred of Ben Elton's new sitcom "The Wright Way". Among the critics' comments were "Unmitigated horror" and "fully deserved its graveyard slot in the schedule". Even the Radio Times slated it for being old-fashioned and sexist - adjectives which would have horrified Ben Elton twenty years ago.

Sorry folks, but I thought it was OK. The plots intertwined and cracked along quite nicely, there was some nice visual comedy with the tap which only spouts when pressure is exerted (they drive me mad as well), the routine in which Gerald Wright has to keep returning to the apathetic salesgirl to get his scarf built well and had me chuckling. And Wright's character, though far from being a David Brent sitcom monster of genius, is a competently drawn and amusing study of someone who can't handle the world not going all his way.

That's the word - competent. "The Wright Way" was efficiently put together. It was well paced. There were set pieces at the right times. There were at least four or five gags per minute, ranging from the good-ish to the lame. There was a good mix of characters..... and so on. If a new police procedural thriller was reviewed as "competently written", that would pass as a good notice.

Not so a comedy. If  a sitcom is deemed to be old-fashioned or harking back (perish the thought!) to the 70s, to be a bit sitcom-ish, with too many gags or broad generic characters, critics and punters react as if the writer had suggested that paedophilia is actually quite a good idea. Being well-made is almost part of the insult. If a singer performs in the style of 30 years ago, it's charmingly retro. If a sitcom seems as if it was made in 1975, it's an unmitigated horror.

There's lots wrong with "The Wright Way". The young characters are a cliche based on a cliche (constant repetitions of "yeah, like, totally" won't win Elton any awards for best-observed contemporary dialogue). Too often gag was piled on gag to throw any credibility out of the window. That's something good 70s sitcoms never did. I can see why he included all the characters in Wright's office, but they were so thinly drawn that you could virtually see the actors puffing out their cheeks to make themselves feel present.

I'll probably catch up with Gerald Wright again, but I won't watch every episode. The only sitcom really lighting my fire at the moment is "Parks and Recreation": sweet, real, of the moment and just bloody funny.

How lifelike are comedy characters?

Where do we get our characters from? When I started writing, I had a simple, confident answer: life. If the population of our sitcoms or sketches weren’t lifted directly from the people we met around us, there was something suspiciously untruthful about them.

I once met Maurice Gran (half of Marks & Gran, writers of “The New Statesman” and “Birds of a Feather”) and asked him how much they took their characters from “real life”. “If any of them had been,” he retorted, “They’d have been locked up in a mental home”. I withdrew into my shell. My question had been viciously trampled over.

That was then. Now I know Maurice was right. Characters in sitcoms don’t behave like real humans - even those in ostensibly naturalistic shows like “The Office”. They run through tangled loops of repetitive behaviour with people who, after a week or two, would avoid them, scream at them, hit them or have them locked up. “The Office” ’s David Brent wouldn’t have lasted a month in a real office. He’d have been sacked, demoted or moved sideways.

We keep watching a sitcom, though, because we somehow feel the characters are real.  There’s a vitality to them. We recognise many of their emotions as our own. They ring bells. “I’ve met people just like that” is a frequent comment when people discuss David Brent. What they mean is that they’ve come across managers who sometimes spout meaningless office jargon, who can be embarrassingly matey, who at times can be excruciatingly insensitive.

But none of these real people would interrupt a team building meeting by accompanying themselves on the guitar to their own bad pop song, or give a motivation lecture by rapping throughout with a baseball cap on backwards, and next week leave a person in a wheelchair stranded on the stairs in a fire practice. Brent will commit several similar gaffes every episode.

When we’re writing a sitcom character, they’re a composite of people we’ve met, images dredged from our imagination, ideas springing from our own attitudes, and a calculated need to create conflict with other characters. We’re not copying behaviour from life. We’re doing something much better: we’re creating a completely new entity.

Are Old Jokes Funny?

The first recorded joke was written down in ancient Sumeria in about 1800BC. It went something like this:

“Something which has not occurred since time immemorial: that a young woman did not fart till her husband’s embrace.”

Got you in stitches? Me neither.  Maybe the double negative kills the laugh. Maybe something got lost in translation.

Another old joke, rather more recent, from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”:

OLIVIA  Go to, y’re are a dry fool: I’ll no more of you: besides, you grow dishonest.

CLOWN: Two faults, Madonna, that drink and good company will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry.

By anyone’s standards, that’s pretty feeble. But at least we understand the “dry fool” gag, even if we don’t laugh at it. What can we make of this one from later in the play?

“Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of  thy grandam.”

No doubt Pythagoras and woodcock jokes were all the rage in 1600, but they leave us stony-faced.

It’s clear that context and style in comedy change drastically over the years, to the extent that jokes and sitcoms which made us hoot only twenty years ago now leave us cold. In terms of forcing us to drop our defences and let out a laugh, that is, which you could say is what comedy is all about.

But looking closer at the first two, you can see that they take the form of a joke much as we understand it today. They’re both in two parts. The first sets up an expectation (the setup) and the second subverts it (the punch line).

Our Sumerian gag writer sets things up with a pompous intro which leads us to expect something in the way of historical grandeur. What do we get? A fart.

The sense of the joke is that women fart anyway, and don’t bother too much about what men may think, even when they’re still in the market for a husband. That’s how I take it anyway. If you assume that Sumerian Society was a prim one in which women were expected to be like that, the appeal to people of the time is clear. It’s even slightly subversive. After thought, it’s rather humorous, even to us today.

Shakespeare’s gag is still terrible, but we can see the joke format OK.

Subject matter changes. The existence of the joke seems to be timeless. And long live fart gags.