Sketch

While I find it pretty easy to be funny in social situations with my friends, I have had zero experience in the realm of writing comedy for an audience.  I knew that when I started this blog, I would need to get some hands-on experience so that I could speak on the subject with a bit more professionalism and a lot more knowledge to back up any claims I was making.  With that being said, I decided I would sacrifice my awesome situation of having Fridays off, and sign up for a class at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles.

I started off thinking that I would go into the Improv 101 class.  I heard a lot of great things about it, and I know that performance comedy is what I could really see myself getting into as a career or, given the fact that I live in Los Angeles and everyone and their mother wants to be a performer, perhaps I will be content with it as just a hobby instead.  I talked it over with a few people, including someone from my high school who now works at the theatre, and I was unanimously told that the Sketch 101 class was a better way to go.  They said it would enable me to learn more about writing comedy and finding what is really funny in a scene, and that would help my future endeavors with performance comedy.  So with all of that information, I signed up for the Sketch class.

I walked into the theatre and found myself transformed back into the world I knew so well when I was younger.  I used to do little plays in my community, and I was always cast as the sassy best friend or the goofy character in the scene.  In the theatre I saw the similar small stage and beat up couch to sit on, and I felt that old rush of excitement that came with performing.  I was thrilled because I knew that this time would be so different from my last experience in theatre.  Not only am I older and a bit wiser, but also I will be writing my own sketches instead of performing the words of others.

When class started, I fell in love immediately.  We discussed simple vocabulary at first, watched a few famous sketches such as Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” and an old UCB favorite called “Fortune Cookies,” and I began to see how these scenes take shape.  At first, I thought they just appeared out of thin air, but I realized that they actually come from a very simple source: experiences that the writer has.  We were asked to think of something that had happened to us in the past few weeks, not necessarily anything funny, just something of note that occurred.  After we came up with the anecdote, we were asked to take it to the extreme and see if we could make it into something funny.  For instance, someone talked about how their sisters each had a cat, but when they moved away, her mother was forced to take care of them.  Then we thought it would be great to write a sketch about a woman who inadvertently becomes a cat lady when her children move away.  Someone else said that they found a puppy and were desperately looking for the owner, only to find her and have her be very nonchalant about losing her dog.  That became a sketch about someone who doesn’t seem to care about anything, even the fact that they are giving birth or their son has come back from war.

In the end, the most important thing I learned is that creating a funny sketch is all about taking what you already know and turning it into something outrageous.  Everyone has experienced stories that could become great sketches, they just have to take them to that next level.