Taking the Plunge - Sketch Writing

For the most part, if you ask a comedian how long they spent *wanting* to write or perform, the answer will often be in years, or in some cases decades (Frank Skinner only started performing stand-up in his thirties). This is because there never seems to be an easy pathway into comedy, no apprenticeships or university courses. In fact, as a teenager with comedy dreams (dreams of being involved in comedy that is, not about turning into a Bigfoot and being grated onto a pizza) I always saw the world as being split up into two groups: those who were comedians and those who were not, with no middle ground. Therefore, I ended up thinking that if I sat down one day to write my first sketch and it was unfunny I would have finally answered the question "could I ever be good at this?" in the negative and precluded myself from ever making the leap from one group to the other.

A lot of people don't get past this initial hurdle or, if they do get round to writing a couple of sketches, think they aren't brilliant and then never try again. I have spent a long time experiencing waves of inspiration interspersed with troughs in which I had little faith in my ability. Often all it took to turn a peak into a trough was for me to realise one line I wrote did not work. However, this last half a year has been different, I have been far more consistent in writing and I feel as if my overall output has improved dramatically. I put this down to my decision to "just write" and to consider writing to be a learning experience in itself. Prolific writer and stand-up Richard Herring has been attempting something similar for the last 8 years. He is so convinced of the power of forcing yourself to write that he has set up a blog (http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/) which he updates every day, whether he wants to or not. Anybody that has followed his career path will be able to draw their own conclusions as to whether or not his work has increased in quality as a result...

In this post I'll go through some of the ways that I forced myself to stop procrastinating and start getting stuff down on paper. I have only recently made the transition from "person who wants to write" to "person who writes" and I will be making no claims as to the quality of my work. I merely want to share some of aspects of my experience in the hope that more people will be inspired not to hide their light under a bushel and to, instead, release their bum jokes and sex puns for public consumption.

I want to start by highlighting what I think are, broadly, the three stages of sketch-writing: conception, fleshing out and writing. These require differing levels of effort. The concept often requires very little conscious energy as you can't force yourself to have a good idea. However, the fleshing out and the writing can often be arduous and time consuming. It is for this reason that most ideas either end up completely unwritten or abandoned. The point at which you sit down at notepad and start writing the whole thing becomes real and you have to worry about doing your idea justice. Finding the best way to frame something can be extremely difficult.

My suggestion is that you, as I mentioned before, just start writing! Force yourself to begin and then, subsequently, force yourself to finish. You'll be surprised how simple it can be to fill in the blanks in your idea once you've started. Writing comedy is easy. People will laugh at anything. A cat? Funny. Two cats? Twice as funny. Two cats in hats? Call the BBC!

Okay, that's not true, comedy writing requires a lot of effort and experience. Still, you must just start. Pick any idea, no matter how good and decide to write it. Don't worry about planning how it will be fleshed out; cross that bridge when you come to it. You'll find you can work out dialogue a lot better on the fly than you could by sitting down in a dark room for hours trying to find the perfect line. Don't get me wrong, I am not calling for people to create work which is overly simple or rushed. I believe that a piece of comedy should be intricate and polished. I just think that a solid foundation to a piece can be achieved without hours and hours of planning.

A further advantage of forcing yourself to write is that the more you do so, the better you'll become, regardless of the quality of your previous work. In addition you will find yourself thinking in ways that are more conducive to sketch writing, being better able to work out how funny ideas can fit into sketches and how you might be able to make a sketch out of things that annoy you...

Okay, so you've forced yourself to write. How do you stop yourself looking at the result, hating it, and becoming convinced you were never cut out for the whole thing in the first place? Well, after a few months writing it will become clear that the results are never apparent in the short term and can be very deceptive. In fact, in the nineties Stewart Lee gave up stand-up comedy believing it not to be for him. When he returned to it in the early 2000s he found that the responses he received were better, even with material he had written earlier on. The only factor he could see having changed was his age. People simply accepted his material when it came from a man nearing middle age rather than someone more youthful. In the case of Lee's early forays into stand-up  innate ability was far from correlated to outcome. A sketch or routine's success or failure is based on a number of factors, only one of which is the writer's innate ability. Does it make sense to assume that one to be foremost? Not really. One bad sketch does not a bad writer make.

Podcast Extravaganza

Hello all. I come to you at the tail end of a week which I have spent frantically editing together a disparate collection of audio clips into a (semi) cohesive collection which will form the first Colchester Comedy Workshop Podcast. I hope you will all subscribe on Itunes and take a listen as we should be producing one every month. I bring you this blog today to explain some of the trials we all faced in the making of the podcast and the things I learned in editing it together over the course of this week.

On Sunday 17/2 I bravely opened up my house to the oddballs and clowns of the workshop in the hope that they might be obedient, stand in front of microphones and read sketches. The day was, for the most part, a glorious success. We recorded three full sketches, created a couple of links and bore witness to Modal Robert's moral bankruptcy as he whipped off his trousers in the kitchen during the recording of a particularly lascivious monologue about wanking. Everyone seemed to have a laugh, which is what really matters (take that, audience) and all of the snacks were eaten. There was even talk of us all going for a lovely sit-down meal. Unfortunately one of our company rejected the offer in favour of returning home for a meal of tofu and plantain (or something).

None of us knew what to expect; however I tried to do a good job of looking like I knew what to expect so that everyone would feel at ease. I set up a vast array of equipment in the living room. It looked very professional; unfortunately it sounded relatively amateur and kept hissing at me. I learned that despite the best will in the world, I lacked the experience required to make the day go off without a hitch. However, I have gained a few insights into the world of voice recording. For example, when people haven't learnt their lines, it is a bad idea to have double-sided scripts as apparently turning a piece of paper over in the middle of the sketch makes a noise like a pipe-bomb. I also learnt that copyright is a complete bugger, and that the best way to deal with the issues surrounding the use of other people's work is to steal it and hope that they never notice. (If anybody from the workshop is worried that I might end up dropping them in it, have no fear, I'm more than willing to take the heat if and when the feds knock at the door.) I also learned that there are very few available audio effects that are suitable for approximating the sound of a woman made entirely of tinned goods falling into a cuckoo clock.

The end result, whilst being somewhat rough, was certainly encouraging. We ended up with some relatively good recordings of people's work and everyone got to be involved in the performance in some way. Regardless of the number of listens we receive, I think it is an achievement for us to have got together and created something half an hour long which is not utterly despicable. I spoke to Gavin, one of the members of the workshop, yesterday and he mentioned the fact that being involved in something like this had been an ambition of his for a long time, but that he had lacked the requisite platform. I think that is a common problem amongst comedy types. Thinking you might be capable of writing and performing is a far cry from actually doing it and the lack of opportunities can be infuriating. It was a feeling of such frustration after performing comedy at a poetry slam last year which made me decide to set something up in Colchester. The fact that we have accrued about 60 sketches on celtx.com and are now at a point where we have released half an hour of material means that the workshop is at least a partial success. I have ridiculously high expectations for the rest of 2013.

I am very much looking forward to the next podcast, when material can be custom-written for it and we will have more time to hash out a cohesive structure. It will also, hopefully, be slightly shorter so I can actually earn some money during the week after instead of spending it editing.

Stuart

Here is a rundown of the sketches one by one with credits provided:

1) Dr Yorick McCarthy's Sci-Fi Bookclub
2) Pirates Will be Prosecuted - Simon Goodway
3) Peter Scott's Sportworld (Featuring Arsene Wenger) - James Sarek & Stuart Gardener
4) The World of Modal Roberts Parts 1/2/3 - Modal Roberts
5) The Art of War - Simon Goodway
6) Filth Warning - Holly Powis
7) Audio Diary of a Nobody - Modal Roberts
8) The Perfect Date - James Sarek
9) Jekyll and Hyde - Stuart Gardener

Additional material was provided by Agnes Henson and original music was composed by Louise Byrne.

PS. The following interviews were shot by me as part of my "making everyone feel at ease" campaign.

Sunday Comedy Podcast

Right, well. We all did a very special thing! No not like that.

What happened on the Sunday just gone (17th of February if you want to get all specific) was that the whole of the Colchester Comedy Workshop people/members (except those that didn’t attend) went round to someone’s house - I forget whose, but there were stairs involved – in order to record things onto a compoooter.

James made sure he gathered together some of the most noisiest snacks available in the whole wide world: like nuts and biscuits and crisps, because he thought it would be more challenging that way, and we all wanted a challenge. We definitely all wanted challenges.

That was also why Stuart made sure that the equipment didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to. It was all to make sure that he had a nice challenge.

Well we talked into microphones and sat about laughing at ourselves for a bit. Then Modal locked himself in the kitchen with his laptop and asked not to be disturbed for a while. He may not have been disturbed, but I certainly was.

Any hoo the point is that you lot (our adoring fans) can actually get your ears wrapped around our podcast any day soon!

Ain’t that exciting! Just you wait my little adorable squiggles of joy, you are not going to able to contain yourselves!

Welcome To....

The Colchester Comedy Workshop blog.

We hope, by setting up this page, to provide you with things to laugh at, as well as information about up and coming events, reviews, videos, all that sort of malarkey.

If you'd like to become an administrator for the group - so that you too can post - just contact Colchester Comedy Workshop - colchestercomedyworkshop@gmail.com.

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