Some of this week’s key topics were exploring the ideas of situational comedy and story sketches. My video centres around the concept of a group of friends getting ready to go out, except one begins to question another’s outfit choices, resulting in them having an existential crisis. Maybe not to that extent, but I believe this situation can be seen in varied forms through sitcoms such as The Big Bang Theory.
In all honesty, I did struggle to write this sketch, specifically in terms of writing dialogue and more importantly, figuring out where to condense the sketch as this was a main area of feedback that I have received in previous weeks. To help, I decided to take a look at Joe Toplyn’s take on ‘Story Sketches in ‘Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV’. The reading states that a sketch should have “a beginning that gets you excited, a middle that grips you and an end that delivers.” (Toplyn 2014). From that, there are some steps that one can take to achieve this goal. For example, having “a comic character with two or three exaggerated traits”, and “have someone…oppose your comic character”. I attempted to apply these steps within my sketch, specifically, the comic character being the person in a “strange” outfit that has a mental crisis, and the opposing character being the one that comments on the comic character’s outfit in the first place.
I wanted have a simple concept for this week’s sketch as I felt I could easily apply some of the steps that Toplyn has provided within my writing. While I don’t know if this was my best work out of all three experiments, I do think that it has begun to teach me the basics of story sketches, which I hope to continue to apply this knowledge in future works.
Sketch:
Basic inspiration:
References:
Toplyn, J. (2014), “Story SketchesLinks to an external site.” in Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV, New York: Twenty Lane Media, pp. 221–238.