Link to Sketch 3 – Situational Comedy

To get it out of the way: my delivery of the joke/premise, in my view, is not funny. I think the concept is funny/absurd, but probably required a little too much set-up to establish actually funny jokes.

Which in some ways is my takeaway. We are encouraged to experiment in these classes, so I try hard to push myself to try things irrelevant of how likely I think they will work. This in my view is one of those times (this assignment even says only it might only have one or two comedic moments, which I think was accurate in my case). I had two ideas for this sketch, one being someone who was asked to fill in for a job for a moment in which they clearly aren’t qualified for, and another being scam calls to an emergency dispatch centre. In the end I combined the ideas, and perhaps that was part of the issue (too much to establish with too little time), but I think ultimately with an extra minute it would flow significantly smoother. I don’t dislike the concept or the way I did it, but the acting probably needed to be sharper and simpler for the time constraints. My group also said the idea was promising and something could be made from it, but time constraints may cause difficulties, which was obviously true.

But putting the situation through the “Comic Frame” as we learnt about in our week three classes helped me to identify the concept in and of itself was funny. Setting it up to be a “benign violation” (particularly as no parties are in imminent danger) and showing the premise to be intended as humorous in the form of the character’s naivety and nice-but-oblivious nature, helped me to establish some of the other details of the skit (like how will he escalate the scene with his attempts of solving his obstacle/situation). I sort of improvised the dialogue which I think retrospectively was a mistake, but the pre-production planning of the rest of it I think definitely helped me fit the form of situational comedy better, and definitely could be improved (and be funnier) with a less strict time restraint, prepared dialogue and some acting touch-ups.

It’s also just stupidly hard to be funny for the sake of it, and that’s something I’m still pushing myself on.

References:
AI scammer voice generated by crikk.com
Phone Sound Effect by Shiden Beats Music from Pixabay
Voth, Ben. “Comic Frame.” Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, vol. 1, 2014, pp. 148–50.
Warren, Caleb and McGraw, A. Peter. “Benign Violation Theory.” Mays Business School Research Paper, No. 2015-11, February 2, 2015.