They are cheaper to make and easier to do; you can just cram in loads of talent into a format that works and works. But if you look back, a lot of people we love today like French and Saunders, Ricky Gervais and Steve Coogan, all started in sketch shows.
It’s not the act of arrogance to draw, it’s humbling – you must use your God-given talent. And of all the people I sketch, in most cases I feel I have to measure up to the subject.
In the case of ‘Sweet Tooth,’ and in the case of a lot of stuff I do, it all starts with the image. It may be something I sketch in my sketchbooks – something that reoccurs in the sketchbooks. Eventually, a character or story line starts to grow out of that.
I do feel like anything benefits from character logic. That can be from the dumbest ad to the greatest Shakespearean drama to the silliest ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch. There is a certain specificity in detail, which you can get when you’re paying attention to stuff like that.
I don’t know what a good sketch show is.
I think that one of Tim’s great qualities and abilities is in what seems like a thumbnail sketch to get something quite telling, very simply, when you’re doing it or being in that thumbnail sketch, you don’t feel that it’s important.
The comedy community has embraced us, wholeheartedly. People that are more in the public and celebrity, but even stand-ups, sketch people on ‘SNL,’ those people – and it’s been wonderful to have them embrace it.
What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
One of the best things Gwyneth Paltrow has done in years was her mesmerized, good-sport cameo in a ‘Pootie’ sketch, when she was melted over him like butter on an English muffin.
There’s different kinds of improv. There’s Second City improv where you try to slowly build a nice sketch. There’s stuff you do in college coffee houses where you just go joke, joke, joke. Bring another funny character with a funny hat on his head. Christopher Guest is more the line of trying to get a story out.
I went from an unemployed actor’s life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It’s not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare’s finest characters, but, hey, that’s the way it has happened.
It’s what I’ve trained for, from the first sketch to the fabric. Making dresses that are different from the usual style, and a lot of fun to wear.
If you want to be an actor, you need to learn how to act first, even in sketch comedy.
I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.
Because it’s uncensored cable, I think we’ll be able to do the kind of sketch comedy that really hasn’t been seen before. We can actually finish jokes.
And that’s the case with all of James McMurtry’s songs. He never presents these characters for us to judge, but only to sympathize with. He has a capacity for compassion with every sketch that he makes with a person that he is not.
To me, form is not something that you can plan beforehand, especially for a documentary. You can’t write it or sketch it. It requires a confrontation with reality, with history, with ethics and morals. After identifying good content, you have to find the right form to express that content.
To tell you the truth, I always wanted to be a sketch comedian and a comedy actor.
I want to see Bob Dylan do sketch comedy. I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan.
Sketch shows change gears so drastically every two minutes. I think sketch shows are for sketch fans; they’re not really for everybody.
Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.
A sketch show by its very nature is hit and miss.
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves ‘It’s pretty, but is it Art?’
What I’ve learned from sketch is you can get it as perfect as you want, and it’s never going to be perfect.
I would just sketch everything that was being made for the collections.
If I don’t have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something – a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.
I am constantly in a need to create irrespective of the medium. When I started out, I did sketch and I continue to do so on paper sometimes. Mainly, I work with acrylic and ink. Honestly, I don’t have the patience for oil paint to dry.
Occasionally, I will come across something that has lost its label over the years – maybe the client didn’t want to declare the dress at customs and took the label out – but I’ll recognize it from an image that I’ve seen in Vogue, or a little thumbnail sketch.
I’m not terribly well read. My wife forces books into my hands and insists I read them, which I’m grateful to her for. She made me read ‘War and Peace.’ The whole thing. It was amazing, but I had to hide it. You can’t walk round reading ‘War and Peace’ – it’s like you’re in a comedy sketch and you think you’re smart.
When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.
I get recognised a fair bit. It goes up when ‘Peep Show’ or the sketch show is on the telly or when we’re doing loads of interviews.
In college, I pretty much abandoned music and started performing with the school’s improv and sketch troupe, and at some point, that became my permanent thing.
Without realizing it, I think I’ve wanted to do a sketch show since I was, like, 11 years old. Like everybody else in comedy, I grew up watching ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and I was doing characters with my friends.
People will love something very much or hate something very much. But the great thing about a sketch show is that if something comes along that you don’t like, something else will come along in a minute that hopefully you might like that.
If I told my 18-year-old self that one day I’d have a sitcom and a sketch show on TV, I think he’d just drum his fingers and go, ‘When? How long is that going to take?’
I’ve always wanted to do a sketch show. And they’ve sort of gone out of fashion for a bit, or they’ve just stopped doing them for whatever reason.
It’s absolutely surprising to me how well ‘The State’ has held up as far as people liking it and having fond memories of it, considering it’s a sketch show. I think one of the things that helped its mystique is, it never came out on DVD or video or whatever.
The best sketch shows are from a group of tight-knit people who’ve worked together for a really long time.
In your 20s, you’re just a sketch of what you think you’re trying to be.
But long story short, I didn’t start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.
Sometimes, I sit down to sketch at the unearthly hour of 3 in the morning!
My mother was a seamstress, so I always grew up with her making clothes. I knew how to construct outfits. I knew how to sketch. I knew how to customise. But I could never imagine it as a career.
For me, I was literally trying to stay afloat. I never actually thought I would get my own sketch show. So the idea that one day I would have my own show is pretty wild. But once I got it, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is exactly what I always wanted to do.’
A couple of friends and I started a sketch comedy group when we were teenagers, just for fun and to start creating stuff. It was a blast.
I normally keep a series of draft in a catalogue type of book in which I scribble, sketch and draw ideas.
I can’t think of another place other than TV where a five-person sketch comedy group could make a living.
At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.
I steal props from ‘SNL’ a great deal. Almost every sketch I’m in, I try to grab something from it, so I have a storage space full of props.
When you sketch a shoe but don’t have the intention to do a proper shoe, it remains a curvy sketch with no detail. The shoe completely morphs to the body.
I do like a well-written sketch with a bunch of jokes in it, and I like stand-up with good jokes in it it.
The thing about stand-up was, I was doing all this sketch and YouTube stuff where I was not being censored and I got to do my own thing, and it was really cool.
My gut feeling about sequels is that they should be premeditated: You should try to write a trilogy first or at least sketch out a trilogy if you have any faith in your film.
But I started out as a comedian doing sketch work where you get to write, produce and direct your own stuff.
I am a keen medievalist and like going around museums and ruins and finding out about the people and local culture. I’m not one for sitting by a pool or lying on a beach. I also like to sketch while I’m on holiday, if I have time.
I formed a sketch troupe with two friends, started doing gigs, and dropped out of school shortly after to pursue it full time! Now it sort of has to work out because I have zero other qualifications.
