I’ve started running three or four times a week, which prompts millions of sketch ideas.
Every sketch goes through a rewrite stage where a group of writers sits around a table and pitches more jokes and ideas for the piece.
When you’re doing sketch comedy and you’re pregnant, it’s like wearing a giant sombrero in every sketch.
It’s a big deal to have Peppermint and Jiggly, two trans women, be on a pre-taped sketch for Saturday Night Live.’
I’m more of a sketch guy than a standup.
We did the ‘MacGruber’ Super Bowl spot for Pepsi, which generated some outside interest. We have a sketch where a guy blows up after 90 seconds. How are we going to make that into a movie?
‘Weekend Update’ can be presented as a full 20-minute sketch, and there’s a lot of room there.
Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang – even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.
There is force and vitality in a first sketch from life which the after-work rarely has. You want a picture to seize you as forcibly as if a man had seized you by the shoulder! It should impress you like reality!
I love dry British humor. I love to sketch in my off time. I love tequila.
By the time I got to uni sketch comedy was much more fashionable than stand-up.
As an artiste, I made sure that the character sketch and look of each mother I played was different.
My mom would take me to restaurants, and the first thing I’d ask for would be a pen and a napkin, and I’d sketch shoes and shoes and shoes.
I paint or sketch for two, three hours every day. It keeps me sane.
I had a sketch called ‘Fedora Basketball,’ which was about basketball players having to wear hats; in addition to scoring points, they have to make sure their fedoras don’t fall off.
I used to put on sketch shows at boarding school when I was eight. I’m not sure about the material, but it did used to get a laugh.
The truth is, I don’t sketch much at all. I have a very visual/spatial brain that retains a lot of information about maps, directions, positioning, and details, so I usually prefer working out those issues on the page itself.
I talk as I sketch, too, in order to keep their minds off what I’m doing so I’ll get the most natural expression I can from them. Also, the talking helps to size up the subject’s personality, so I can figure out better how to portray him.
If you start to disrespect the character you’re playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it’s all technique. It’s like watching a juggler – you can be impressed by it, but it’s not going to touch you in any way.
I went back over the sketch books I’d filled at Sheffield for ideas and discovered Wallace and Gromit, except Gromit was a cat then. I made them into Plasticene shapes and started ‘A Grand Day Out.’ It took me longer than I expected.
Stand-up and sketch and improv – that’s the most direct contact you can have with somebody, making them laugh. I like that. I like the intimacy.
After I work with my editor to get the manuscript in good shape, I sketch and lay out a whole book loosely, usually in black and white. You learn things about your text when you have to think about pacing and page-turns.
There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it’s kind of like one-man sketch.
Stand-up for me is just my opinions on things, so it wouldn’t be as fun translated into a sketch. Nor would a sketch be as fun if it were me standing there saying it.
I was nine when I started getting laughs in a school comedy sketch one day, and acting became all I wanted to do. I’m sure my career choice was difficult for my parents: they would have had the usual parental neurosis about how tumultuous the business can be, with lots of actors out of work.
Well, I get my subject on Wednesday night; I think it out carefully on Thursday, and make my rough sketch; on Friday morning I begin, and stick to it all day, with my nose well down on the block.
I took classes and performed and did improv and sketch and wrote sketches and did lights and sound for other people’s shows just so I could be around the theater. That was about seven nights a week for seven years.
I did sketch comedy with a troupe at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
At first, there was a separation of clubs and sketch comedy. Now there’s all kinds of comedy, making us one big happy family.
I was my mom’s oldest child, so she was like, watching closely and taking notes, like, ‘Okay, this is what she gravitates towards,’ and she gave me all the tools to keep me focused. I liked to write; she got me notebooks. I wanted to draw; she got me sketch books and crayons and coloured pencils.
When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.
We agree that there is a problem in the sketch and improv community where, in general, there should be more interest from a more diverse sampling of our society. That is precisely why we do have diversity scholarships and why we’ve put together a diversity program to try to figure this problem out.
Canada has been a breeding ground for great comedic actors, sketch artists and stand-up comedians. We grew up with a different perspective on the world.
It’s a very hard thing to explain when we sit with writers on our shows. But then if they show us a sketch, instinctively we’d know who we’d play.
I was a baby when I began, but I knew exactly what I wanted to wear myself. I became a jewelry designer because I knew how to do something with a pencil and sketch my ideas.
We come from a live background of sketch improv and standup.
I didn’t understand when somebody thanked me for writing a good sketch, because it was something I wanted to do, but now I totally get it, because when someone writes something great for me, I’m so appreciative.
I love sketch; it’s my favorite form. But if it’s all improv, they’re either very good, and it’s annoying how good they are, and it makes you feel bad, or they’re not too good; then you’re sweating for them.
I’ve only written stand-up and sketch before, so writing something long-form on my own is proving quite difficult. But I’m enjoying it as well.
I’m partial to a Muji recycled-paper sketch book and a Sharpie ultrafine marker.
I think sketch writing is a good spot for everyone to start because it requires you to develop characters, have a beginning, middle and end and have a bunch of jokes in a short amount of time.
I used to sketch – that’s the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don’t do it much.
One thing you learn from comedy writing, or sketch writing, is just to be vicious about cutting. Do not get sentimental about cutting. That bit doesn’t work, get it out.
I moved to Chicago and I did theater, and then I started writing and I stop acting and I did sketch. You know, I did all of the things that, if you were serious about doing television, don’t do.
The label ‘wife of the prime minister’ is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I’m a human being.
My first book was called, ‘Mountain, Get Out of My Way,’ where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people’s lives and trying to be motivational.
You only feel as good as your last sketch.
Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.
I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I’ve just tried to learn as I go.
Life experiences help in understanding the character. And many things come to your mind regarding the character sketch when you read the script as many times as possible.
Because I never plan anything out ahead of time, I’m always in the process of learning about my characters. Without a biographical sketch to guide me, I discover things about my heroines as the stories unfold. Only in ‘Body Double’ did I discover that Maura’s mother was a serial killer.
I grew up in rural Ireland; we only had a few TV channels and had never even heard of sketch shows, but it was completely natural for me to tell jokes and stories.
When I was 10 or 11, I started to sketch, and my drawings happened to be like fashion drawings… I’m lucky to have had this dream to chase since I was very young.
