Situational or Story sketches are probably the forms of comedy I am most acquainted with, growing up watching YouTubers like Smosh and watching TV. shows like Saturday Night Live. It is a form of comedy that I think has the potential to be the funniest though it also is probably one of the hardest to pull off consistently and effectively. In my opinion, the best examples of this form of comedy come from Tim Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave”, a Netflix original sketch show with some of the funniest gags I’ve seen. What Makes this show in particular so good is that Robinson combines many, many different forms of comedy, including what we looked at previously (surprise, and silent) making it seem effortless, which is an intimidating standard to live up to.

When looking at most story sketches they can all be broadly broken down into the template seen in the reading “Comedy for Late-Night TV” where the author Joe Toplyn breaks down sketches seen most commonly in talk shows into nine steps. Out of all these steps, the main factor is having an exaggerated, comic character, someone who has one or two exaggerated traits and who is out to get something (in a broad sense). As mentioned before this idea of an exaggerated character is something Tim Robinson is very good at playing, being able to be ‘random’ without it seeming cringey or low-brow. What I think also makes Tim Robinson stand out is when he plays the straight character and another actor plays the exaggerated one, as seen in the short we watched in class with Bob Odenkirk. This reversal of expectations adds to the humour and turns pretty mundane situations on paper into iconic sketches.

For my sketch this week I had a lot of trouble with coming up with a simple 1 minute long idea. Unlike the other weeks, this sketch involved a little more planning as I had to think of a rough script. Ultimately I think my video is relatively funny though I am not the greatest at thinking of dialogue so I definitely relied a bit on the physical humour which doesn’t fit the brief exactly so I need to work on that. The feedback from last week mostly related to the last-minute short nature of my clip so this week I tried to put a bit more effort in as this is a form of comedy I’m a little more passionate about.