How To Be A Comedy Writer by Marc Blake

Author:Marc Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: comedy, writing, write, creative, sitcom, stand up, comedian, funny, laugh, joke, screenplay, comic, situation, monty python, basil, fawlty, friends
ISBN: 9781849892315
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2010
Published: 2010-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Themes and formats

The theme of Goodness Gracious Me was Asians in Britain. Little Britain is a pot-pourri of off British characters played by two actors. Does He Take Sugar? (BBC Radio 4) was about disability. The theme encompasses the show.

The format is the collection of elements that go to make it up. From the outside most formats look the same - a bunch of quickies interspersed with running characters and longer sketches. However, it’s your approach that counts. A simple analogy: you have eggs, flour, milk, lemon and sugar: the theme is a pancake, the ingredients are the format. If you to develop your own half-hour sketch show then you need to be in the pancake business.

The theme of my BBC radio series Whining for England was an A-Z of moaning about our nation. The format was that I divided the letters into six parts, and had a monologue and sketch for each one (some letters were harder than others). There was a song each week. It seems simple, but it took me four years of being turned down to get to it.

Sketch shows are also often centred on the particular talents of a comedian of the day (e.g. Lenny Henry, Kenny Everett or Catherine Tate). Sometimes the show pretends not to have a format (e.g. The Goon Show ) but if you listen to it regularly, you will find that there are running characters or certain styles of sketches. Nothing is totally free form.

There have been sketch shows set in mock news networks, pirate or satellite stations. The media often comes up because of its easy access to stories, but this is a fairly hackneyed setting. It is not possible to sell a portfolio of sketches alone unless your writing is so unique that they simply have to create a format around you.

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