British Comedy Guide

Does anyone fancy writing a joint sketch on here? Page 9

Ok let's keep it comedy jazz like - no pressure - one or two sketches at a time and see what happens. We can try different things different weeks including topical if we carry on. Let's try to do everything everyone suggests over time.

It doesn't always have to be a competition unless people want that, but I do think it might be worthwhile specifically choosing someone at the end of the line to do a ruthless edit.

I don't have that confidence to make huge cuts in other writers' works and I think one or two others feel the same.

So shall we try topical next weekend? Is Newsrevue on every week? If people agree we can buy the same newspaper one day and see if we can come up with one or two between us?

Once we decide what to do it might be worth starting a new thread so anyone new doesn't have to read through all this!

Jx

I must admit I don't think I would be as keen on a topical sketch - buying newspaper etc - would really cut down the ideas/imagination aspect of it for me and I think you would be reading 2 very similar sketches each week, just worded differently. It wouldn't be 2 brilliantly original sketches. Butthat's only my opinion, take it as you wish.

I would also suggest perhaps writing from the start/middle of week and having the deadline for some point during the weekend? Again, just a suggestion.

Image

Here's a joint sketch.

She looks like my sister

Here's a joint sketch.

Oi! I've already done that one on page one. Keep up!

Yeah but mine was a different kind of sketch! :)

It's a double pun.

I don't know.......call themselves judges

:D

It could work as a spring board if we keep going. The standard pretty good for both our first efforts I think. Don't go down the topical route because if we did get a body of work behind us it wouldn't be useable.

If we decided to put something together then we could revisit and tighten things up. We'd only be doing what they did for things like Blackadder. That seemed to go down well (in the end).

I thought this might get complicated!

Let's start with a list of people who are interested in giving it another go. We'll do it in a similar way to last time - if there are enough by the weekend we can split into teams. Decide who's first and last and shuffle the rest up in between.

Not topical then - and we can decide if there's a theme once we know who's in. It doesn't have to be finished over a weekend - but lets give it 4-5 days max to keep it moving.

I'm thinking so far it's

Jane P
SootyJ
Tom G
RobO
Craig Hosie
Timbo
Ben
Ponderer
Roscoff

If any of the above don't want to, let me know and if anyone else fancies it please confirm!

And Dolly and Marc should join forces to write the ultimate 'joint' sketch.

Thanks

Jane x

I'd be up for doing it again :)

Same here.

I don't want to rain on your parade, guys, but apart from the judges, there doesn't seem to be a lot of feedback from people that weren't involved in the writing. Anyone can write a sketch and then sit back and say how wonderful it is, I do it all the time.

As for the winning sketch, I found it quite poor. All you have done , essentially, is find a novel way to recycle classic comedy material. Most of the laughs come from gags that you didn't actually write.

I'd be up for it again!

Cheers Don.

Quote: don rushmore @ April 14 2009, 2:47 PM BST

All you have done , essentially, is find a novel way to recycle classic comedy material. Most of the laughs come from gags that you didn't actually write.

This isn't, essentially, true, the laughs come from the use made of the reference points, not from the reference points themselves; but I did feel that once we had the initial premise (and congrats to Sootyj on that for our team) we were shooting fish in a barrel. With a sketch the humour springs, or should spring, from the initial premise, so there is a lot of pressure on the originator, and frankly not many sketches yield up more than a handful of decent gags, so I can see that on future efforts the role of the other contributors is going to be primarily editorial.

Anyway I do think it is worth doing again to see how we get on, and I will be interested to see how we get on with a different premise. If it is does not work, rather than abandoning the concept entirely we should perhaps look at different approaches to collaborating.

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