Girl drink drunk is such a classic. We had a company happy hour at a tiki bar recently. I wish I had remembered this sketch beforehand and sent it to a few coworkers!
I think one of the reasons that the Pre-Taped Call-in Show sketch is so good is that David Cross's frustration is at odds with the complexity of the show's format. One of the loudest laughs happens around the 2:20 mark, where he acts as if the format is simple. Then the laughter gets louder when he brings the TV into frame, and we see him doing that same thing within previous tapings.
It's his anger in this context of complexity that is so giddily absurd and I think drives the laughter. If he were just getting louder and angrier, the sketch wouldn't work. It's the juxtaposition against what he's reacting to that drives the comedy.
There's an improv game that teaches this well: Good Bad Worst. Audience member asks a question, a panel of improvisers gives good, then bad, then the worst advice.
And it's crucial that it goes in that order! The good advice buys time for the bad and worst to think, the bad advice sets the scale of what we consider bad, while being a little funny. The worst advise blows up the scale, resulting in comedy.
Have you ever read How Fiction Works? It's pretty short, and New York magazine says, "You could stir an industrial vat of molasses with James Wood’s Chekhov boner."
Anyway, it's about "novelistic writing", and one of his claims (probably, it's been awhile,) is that, in a novel, the author peeks through the prose sometimes by means of tonal motion: moving from high to low, shaking up the reader to pique them.
I wonder if something similar is also going on with escalation in comedy. If you think of escalation as a species of "comedic motion," It's a way for the whole setup to kind of wink at the audience without becoming entirely unconcealed. I wish I had a specific example at hand, but you know how some sketches can fail exactly because they did not go over the top? You could say, well it just never got very funny, but it's also that when you don't get a (literally) apocalyptic, over the top punchline, I think it's like you still feel "outside" of the joke. At worst, it can make you actually suspicious of the comedian(s), like, "wait, is this what they really believe?" Sometimes a great sketch, with great motion, will make you laugh for a while and then say, "...stupid" and that's a good thing.
I’ll drink 🥛 to this! Thank you Jeff!! And thanks for my new watchlist.
“the sketch can’t just be the detective drinking ever-larger quantities of cum.”
This is where we disagree.
Girl drink drunk is such a classic. We had a company happy hour at a tiki bar recently. I wish I had remembered this sketch beforehand and sent it to a few coworkers!
I think one of the reasons that the Pre-Taped Call-in Show sketch is so good is that David Cross's frustration is at odds with the complexity of the show's format. One of the loudest laughs happens around the 2:20 mark, where he acts as if the format is simple. Then the laughter gets louder when he brings the TV into frame, and we see him doing that same thing within previous tapings.
It's his anger in this context of complexity that is so giddily absurd and I think drives the laughter. If he were just getting louder and angrier, the sketch wouldn't work. It's the juxtaposition against what he's reacting to that drives the comedy.
There's an improv game that teaches this well: Good Bad Worst. Audience member asks a question, a panel of improvisers gives good, then bad, then the worst advice.
And it's crucial that it goes in that order! The good advice buys time for the bad and worst to think, the bad advice sets the scale of what we consider bad, while being a little funny. The worst advise blows up the scale, resulting in comedy.
How about a Komedy Klass about using callbacks?
Have you ever read How Fiction Works? It's pretty short, and New York magazine says, "You could stir an industrial vat of molasses with James Wood’s Chekhov boner."
Anyway, it's about "novelistic writing", and one of his claims (probably, it's been awhile,) is that, in a novel, the author peeks through the prose sometimes by means of tonal motion: moving from high to low, shaking up the reader to pique them.
I wonder if something similar is also going on with escalation in comedy. If you think of escalation as a species of "comedic motion," It's a way for the whole setup to kind of wink at the audience without becoming entirely unconcealed. I wish I had a specific example at hand, but you know how some sketches can fail exactly because they did not go over the top? You could say, well it just never got very funny, but it's also that when you don't get a (literally) apocalyptic, over the top punchline, I think it's like you still feel "outside" of the joke. At worst, it can make you actually suspicious of the comedian(s), like, "wait, is this what they really believe?" Sometimes a great sketch, with great motion, will make you laugh for a while and then say, "...stupid" and that's a good thing.