Snack Attack Page 2

I dream of that every day, I know what I do needs adjusting as a matter of fact one very smart poster recently went to the trouble of editing one of my sketches and I was over the moon with the end result, it was so much better than mine.

But the process is painstaking and when it's all done and you send it to anyone you never get a reply so in the end I write merely as a hobby these days.

I was working on a novel but between nights shifts on minimum wage and a really slow paying card writing, I have nowhere near the time it takes.

Put yourself in the producers shoes on a budget and look back at your sketch then Teddy, and adjust it so the comic content is the same but the execution is achievable.

I have loads I have trimmed perked and preened Mark, but what's the point? There is no one to send it to?

We both know that with no agent and no friends in the biz anything I send to anyone is classed as unsolicited.

And that's the same for loads of us on this site, so I just write stuff to keep my hand in.

It's like watching an old man building a very small boat on an industrial and battered waterfront.

Despite the skeleton like cranes and the roofless buildings and the dry dock full of flotsam. You can sense that he keeping his hand in, secretly hoping the Liners will return and he can have his day as a real ships carpenter.

If you truly believe that Teddy you are wasting your time. Sketch is just a form and not a major one at. Concentrate your energies on a novel or something you believe will be made or produced...a stage play for example. Or have sketch writing as you say as a hobby but enjoy it.

I agree Mark but if I don't keep posting stuff how the hell will I know if my writing is funny enough? I could spend two months writing 700 hundred pages of shit that's not even remotely funny to anyone other than myself?

The punch for me misses the target. Who are we laughing at, the chef or the scouser? Is the scourer ignorant or is he deliberately trying to wind up the chef? In either case, surely the chef would just look down his nose at the scouser, show him the door and get on with his day, his sense of superiority in tact?

You have spent a lot of time, amusingly - though as Marc points out, impractically - setting up the character of the chef, but if the sketch is about pricking pomposity it has to be about the interaction between characters, which is the point at which the sketch stops. For it to be funny the scouser has to get under the chef's skin to the point where he undermines his own pretensions. See for instance the work of Marty Feldman or Arthur Haynes, both masters of this sort of sketch.

Tursiops I can see your point, but for me it's a make your own ending up type of sketch.

In my mental ending I would not envisage the Ghastly Gaul manhandling a Scouser at all, that's like kicking a lazy Lion.

Well that's cool too... But a novel is different to a sketch.believe in yourself and write for yourself and hopefully that will find an audience. Art is the universal penned through the individual to the universal as CS Lewis wrote in his preface to paradise lost. And if there is a better definition I am yet to hear it.

I prefer the preface from Arthur Haines novel 'Aye Up Mother'

The semi autobiographical account of his life as a gay basher in 1950's Huddersfield may not be a classic especially as he admits to head butting Joe Orton in a Wigan Nightclub.

However for me he put my plight in a nutshell

He said

If you go out out without checking the weather and if you don't keep an eye on your watch, by midnight you'll be f**king freezing and lost.

As a metaphor It's good career advice and checking on what's needed to get in and have a stab at being successful etc. But it's not all about the individual and the cult of the personality is the point I was making.

Although as a caveat perhaps compass might be a better object to keep one's eye on to stick to the sense of the metaphor.

Sorry, I not only go off like a two bob rocket, I also have trouble taking things seriously which in its self creates a great deal of irony.

It's a conundrum for sure!

And it won't let you down

Teddy, you can write.

I agree there is not a lot to do with sketches of a non topical nature but putting 'all' your energies into posting them on here is going to frustrate you even more than you already sound! Keep an eye out for opportunities to get them in from of people who could do something with them, perhaps an animation company as your sketches are very visual.
Have you any interest in topical? and didn't you mention you were writing a novel before? hows that going?

It's not Shan, I have it in my head every word, but I can't find the time or space needed to write it at the moment.
Like most writers these days the harsh realities of keeping the wolf away from the door means you can't get over to the table to write, it's like a hideous Disney Cartoon.