The Sketch:

In this week’s lessons, we explored situation comedy (a.k.a the sitcom), and how these situations are turned comical. We analysed the 9 steps to form a proper story sketch from Toplyn (2014) and applied them to our own planning stages for the third experiment. This dive into story-based sketches meant I had to draw inspiration from a normal situation and twist it to be humourous, and I immediately drew from the tech guys who were attempting to fix the shoddy sound system in our studio room. Obviously, it is hard to apply the nine steps in a short period of time, but drawing inspiration from another ‘I Think You Should Leave’ sketch, I wanted to have a character escalate things quickly and pulling from the theories in previous weeks, have a moment/violation that disrupts what appears to be a normal situation.

9 Steps to think of a situation sketch “Story Sketches” Toplyn, J. reading

1. Think of a comic character with two or three exaggerated traits (can be as small as an item of clothing or a like) 
2. Make your character want something 
3. Have someone oppose your comic character
4. Have comic character take several steps to get what they want, each more radical than the last
5. Raise the stakes
6. Have comic character do something really extreme
7. Have your comic character not get (or get) what they want
8. Throw in a final twist 
9. Add the dialogue

The exaggerated aspect of my comic character was his faith in the ‘computer gods’, which then later escalates the situation when he gets very intense about his advice to say a prayer to the aforementioned gods. I also wanted to have some sort of final twist to tick as many of those 9 steps as possible and had this final twist be that the prayer actually worked to the surprise of the other character. In terms of the comic frame, I struggled to find a way to set it up in the short time span for the situation I had in mind, so in that aspect, I think I need to workshop ideas more with others to really have a clear set-up.

The feedback I received on the last sketch was surrounding the fact that as funny as long awkwardness and dragging out the punchline can be, I should aim to keep things short and sharp so they really land, which was much easier to achieve with a situation comedy, and I believe the joke lands much better than it did in previous weeks.

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