By Paul Holliday. I’m excited to be producing my first live comedy show, ‘A Little Bit Sketchy‘. And at the Lowry no less! It’s been quite a trek to get the show up and running and thought to share a few bits of my experience.

By Dan Page

Okay, clickbait alert! I haven’t personally become a BBC accredited supplier because, well, people can’t. But companies that people set up can. And – spoiler alert – I just stubbed my toe. Wait, that’s not how that works…the point is, I’ve set up my own company and as of January 2020 I’ve been able to formally pitch ideas to the BBC through it.

Some of you out there may be asking what the fuss is all about. I mean, anyone can pitch ideas to the BBC, right?

The answer is yes…and no. It’s yes in the sense that anyone can email a BBC Producer with an idea and ask them if they want to commission it. It’s no in that the likelihood of this succeeding is about as high as me suddenly understanding Quantum Mechanics and unifying it with the theory of General Relativity (although I do have some very promising ideas involving penguins and the old packets of mints you sometimes find in your coat).

It’s also no in that official BBC policy is that they won’t accept programme ideas from individuals unattached to a production company and that to formally pitch you have to register as a supplier. 

What’s interesting though is that in the last 18 months or so, the BBC have relaxed the rules as to who can become registered.  

Previously to become a supplier you had to have experience in delivering programmes to network radio (e.g. the BBC Radio), or have access to people with that experience. Which is pretty much the ultimate chicken and egg situation, in that how can you gain experience delivering programmes to the BBC if you’re not allowed to deliver without experience?

The standard get-out clause was to form a company with an ex-BBC producer (hence why so many independent Production Companies have ex-BBC producers on their boards).

But recently the BBC added a clause to their requirements that allowed podcast production companies with at least 2 active podcast feeds to register.

And this was HUGE. Because it meant that:

1. The BBC recognises the importance of podcasting to the audio landscape
2. The BBC is keen to encourage new suppliers
3. My company could register

Because, being the smart, sophisticated* producer that I was, I’d realised that the second podcast that we’d produced – The Engineering Edge – was going live in November, whilst our first show – The DesignSpark Podcast – was still very much live, thus meaning we’d meet that all-important criteria.

BUT before everyone with two podcast feeds reading this article race towards the BBC website and click the ‘sign me up you gorgeous gorgeous people’ button, there’s also the…small matter…of all the other things you need to demonstrate you’re fit to spend public money.

Like a Limited Company registered at Companies house.

Which means a business bank account. And an accountant. And money to pay for them.

And being willing to follow 7 sets of BBC policies and guidelines and 65 pages of BBC Terms of Trade. 

And committing to complying with BBC audio quality standards.

And being registered under the Data Protection Act.

And having Business Continuity, Data Protection, Health and Safety, Equal Opportunity and Diversity and Inclusion policies…alongside an employee code of conduct.

Which unless you’re a smart, sophisticated** producer like me, is a LOT of paperwork. And even if you are, it’s still a LOT of paperwork.

So what’s the moral of the story? Being good at paperwork can help in surprising places. Although being able to come up with original ideas for podcasts is still the most important thing. Well, after being able to unify General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics that is…

Tickets to the live recording of Series 3 of the iTunes Top 10 rated sci-tech-comedy show The DesignSpark Podcast are available now from the box-office at Etcetera Theatre.

* really anal

** really really anal

By Dan Page.

Back to Life is genius.

The acting, the writing, the cinematography, the up-close and personal sound….everything is simply brilliant.  I am in awe of Daisy Haggard, Laura Solon and the whole cast and crew.

But the thing I like most about Back to Life, and arguably why it works so well, is how it breaks a commonly accepted wisdom around the way main characters tend to act and behave.

You see, Miri Matteson doesn’t make bad decisions.

Most, if not all, sitcom plots revolve around an opportunity arising or a problem occurring (the ‘inciting incident’) which the main character(s) subsequently make a series of questionable (if not downright awful) decisions about in their attempt to gain glory or avoid disaster, along the way reaping the (often negative) consequences of their choices. And it’s usually a bumpy ride, with each character suffering along the way.

Really? Is that true? I’d argue self evidently so.

If in each Only Fools episode Del Boy saw an opportunity to make a quick buck then made a really good decision which resulted in him getting the money, before deciding to put it safely in the bank rather than wasting it on a hare-brained scheme, then by episode 12 he’d be a millionaire and the show would be over.  Equally if any of the characters in Friends stopped telling increasingly bigger lies that spin out of control (arguably the plot of most episodes), then the show wouldn’t have been half as fun.

And these decisions often come about because of the character’s main flaw. The thing that prevents them from ever really reaching their goal. Lister’s laziness means he’ll never become a better person, Fleabag’s selfish anxiety means she’ll always struggle with relationships, and Sheldon’s lack of empathy means he’ll never become as well respected as Einstein.

But in Back to Life, arguably the only bad decision Miri Matteson makes is cutting her fringe badly.  EVERYTHING else she does makes sense in the context of her mission to make sense of her life and the world she finds before her.  Equally Miri doesn’t really have an obvious flaw.  In fact, she’s tremendously likeable, pragmatic and sensible and does a pretty good job of saying and doing sensible things.  

Yet despite all this, Miri Matteson suffers EACH and EVERY episode.  

So why is this? Why does a genuine, well-intentioned, sensible, clear-thinking character suffer? And how do writers Daisy Haggard and Laura Solon pull off this trick?

Four reasons:

1. Every other character (bar one) thinks that Miri is a bad person who does bad things. They’d already made up their mind. So it doesn’t matter what Miri says or does – they simply won’t believe her (even her parents struggle with this).  Which means it doesn’t matter if she is flawed or not – everyone else believes she is.

2. Every other character (bar one), does make bad decisions driven by their flaws.  Her selfish mother can’t stop her affair with Miri’s sex-mad (and now married) ex-boyfriend Dom.  Her obsessive compulsive dad focuses on rituals and rules in order to avoid facing up to reality, naive businessman Nathan can’t even run a fish and chip shop in a seaside town (and hires the most hated woman there to work in it) and best friend Mandy lies to herself and everyone else to deflect from her past.  And the consequences of THEIR actions are affecting everyone else, especially Miri.

3. Within this ‘mad’ world there are two ‘sane’ characters – Miri herself and next door neighbour Billy. By giving us two rational people trying to do sensible things for the right reasons in amongst a town’s worth of flawed fools, the writers generate both difference and heart. The former being the engine room of comedy, the latter of likeability. And both of which combine to give pathos. Crucially though, even though Miri discovers Billy to be an island of solace in a sea of hate, her relationship with him is still complicated and painful.

4. Arguably the biggest reason why Miri suffers every episode is because she did make ONE very bad decision in the past. And it’s the consequences of this decision that constantly (and indeed will forever) spill over into her life. So perhaps Miri is, after all, a classically flawed sitcom character, with all her bad decisions rolled into one.

And yet to argue this last point would, in my opinion, itself be flawed.  

For it’s revealed over time that Miri’s ‘poor’ decision in the past was (spoiler alert) both not of her own making and not in itself a bad decision.  You and I would probably do the same in the situation she faced. To emphasise this, Miri finds herself put under pressure in another situation that results in a similar outcome.  And yet once again, her actions are honest and not ill-willed, but an understandable decision when backed into a corner, as opposed to some inherent flaw-driven reaction that singles her out from anyone else.

So the way I see it, Miri Matteson doesn’t make bad decisions. And in virtually any other sitcom this would be a bad decision. But here it’s…well…genius.

Dan Page is a writer, script-editor and Chief Egg at Why Did The Chicken? where he offers professional script-notes, 1-2-1 mentoring and original, talent led content. Say hello via dan@whydidthechicken.com.

His new show The DesignSpark Podcast explores the comedy past, present and future of some of the hottest topics in tech. Episode 1 launches May 20th on iTunes, Podbean and Spotify.

By Chris Head and Steve Whiteley

I’m Chris Head, and in this blog Steve Whiteley and I will be discussing online comedy sketches and shorts. I’m a comedy director, coach, script-editor and author of “A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up”. Steve (pictured above on “Swiped” shoot) is an actor, film maker and the man behind comedy urban poet Wisebowm. Steve also runs Offkey World, an award winning comedy content production company, and produces BuzzFeed’s comedy branded content ‘Presents’ series which has reached over 10 million online views.

As Steve’s new short “Swiped” (that I script-edited) is released (watch here) we discuss sketches and shorts in a kind of sandwich format: Steve/ me/ Steve. First up, so you know the kind of work we’re talking about, Steve reveals some of his favourite online sketches and why he likes them.

Steve Whiteley on his favourite sketches:

I loved this ‘Too Many Bags’ BBC Quickies sketch, performed by the Massive Dad sketch group. It’s so well observed, relatable and heightens with a lovely punchline.

‘Fiery Hawk’ from Cardinal Burns is still one the best. It’s again so well observed in terms of highlighting how ridiculous some auditions can be (particularly commercials – some still give me sleepless nights to this day). It’s brilliantly silly and builds and builds, ending with a hilarious throwaway line.

Key & Peele are in my opinion the kings of online sketches and ‘Flicker’ is my all time fave.

It looks great, they find the device in the sketch and repeat and build it to surreal proportions and it feels like a short film in a sketch.

Chris Head on Steve’s sketch picks and writing techniques:

The “Too Many Bags” sketch is a lovely example of taking an observation from everyday life and then exaggerating it to absurd degrees. This has an absurdist feel but performed quite naturalistically. This naturalism colliding with absurd content is a common quality of online sketches and comedy shorts and is a great technique. A lot of the humour here is coming from the incongruity of the things the customers are doing in the cafe. I love the scientist with the test tube and the throwaway gag of the Georgian looking pie seller, which nicely echoes people who do go into cafes to sell things for charity or beg. It’s also a great example of my model of the classic sketch structure. Set-up/ reveal/ escalation/ payoff:

Set-up: A woman is entering a cafe with a couple of bags and is coming to meet a friend.

Reveal: She hits someone with a bag blatantly in the face.

Escalation: She keeps on hitting people and to keep it building they up the ante each time and bring in absurd people and activities.

Payoff: This is a false dawn/ new character enters ending. The false dawn is at last it seems like the madness is over – she sits down with her friend. But then the new character comes in with a huge rucksack and we are right back in the madness.

Keeping this structure in mind will really help when writing your own pieces. Then we come to the Cardinal Burns sketch which is also performed naturalistically but this time the absurdity is simply in the images and the behaviour of the director rather than incongruous details you wouldn’t find in the situation. The sketch is billed under the name of their original sketch trio Fat Tongue (which they were in alongside Sophie Black who appears here as the director’s assistant). This is also an exaggeration of an everyday experience – at least for jobbing actors. Even if we’re not in that category we still get the idea of auditions and the power imbalance therein so it’s as recognisable as the cafe situation.

It also follows the classic sketch structure I discuss above. It sets up the situation (which takes longer than the Too Many Bags one but as it’s so well made, performed and observed we’re willing to give it time). The reveal is the director is going to get him to act out stupid things. (Probably the “more thirsty than that” is the moment it’s revealed he is going to push it to absurdity). Then it escalates through increasingly bizarre instructions that the actor (desperate for the work) complies with. Then the payoff is the abrupt turning down of the actor.

Notice that both these sketches are basically working through one central comic idea. It’s important to be clear what your idea is and to be focussed and disciplined in working through that one idea: not introducing other ideas that may be funny but are off the point and confuse the focus.

And finally Key & Peele are great and an example of sketches that were made originally for a TV sketch show but have a massive audience and afterlife online. Their sketch ‘Flicker’ while playing out across a longer length still follows the set-up/ reveal/ escalation/ payoff structure and is relentlessly developing one central comic idea. The escalation here happening across a series of steps and the whole covering more time than the classic sketch format which has a unity of time and space (they tend to take place in one main location and unfold in real time across the duration of the sketch). Both Too Many Bags and Fiery Hawk do this.

The Key & Peele sketch is also doing something more than observing and exaggerating a real life situation. This is one I describe as a ‘big/small’ sketch. It’s taking all the familiar filmic, narrative and acting devices from the BIG world of TV or movie thrillers and bringing it into the small world of office pranks and banter. This kind of transposition from big to small is a great device for comedy. Another great example is Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s movie Hot Fuzz where US cop show action is transposed into a small English village.

Another aspect of the Key & Peele one is that they are able to convincingly recreate the look and feel of the dramas they are transposing into the small world of office pranks. It can be hard for low budget film makers producing online sketches to achieve this. It can be done to a degree with skill, imagination or creativity of course – and more budget – but if not you can make the low production values part of the comedy. Or you can draw on a style like mockumentary that is much easier to achieve on a low budget.

And speaking of the practicalities of making sketches back to Steve…

Steve on making sketches and shorts:

It’s a great time to be making these kinds of online sketches and shorts. You can now shoot and edit a sketch and then distribute it all on your phone. Gone are the days when you needed an expensive camera and lighting to film something. And now with so many online platforms available there are plenty of opportunities to grow an audience.

If you’re shooting sketches or shorts on your iPhone you don’t need much extra kit to do a good job. You could buy some additional lenses, a couple of LED panel lights, sound recorder and some mics and you’re away. Sean Baker the director of The Florida Project shot his breakout indie film ‘Tangerine’ on a trio of iPhone 5s.

In terms of looking for cast and crew it varies from project to project. I started off in comedy by going to improv classes with Hoopla and then performed in a troupe before deciding to launch a YouTube channel called Offkey World, where I collaborated with other improvisers, comedians and film makers to create sketches and then made silly music videos. When I first started making sketches I was very inexperienced and had a friend who would double up as gaffer and sound recordist; it was all hands on deck.

But there are plenty of online platforms where you can find crew such as Shooting People and Facebook groups such as Film London Talent Connect. Once you’ve got into the rhythm of making content regularly you often find you start working with the same crew who are at a similar experience level to you. So ultimately you all come through together and everyone benefits. For more on this and to get some all round inspiration watch Mark Duplass’ SXSW speech/advice on how to become a film maker.

My own latest short ‘Swiped’ is a mockumentary that I worked on with Chris that follows Jordan and his friends Ryan and Talia on a London estate. Alarmed by the detrimental effect smartphones are having on those around them, they launch an initiative ‘Swiped’, which aims to make people more present by stealing their phones using mopeds. It parodies real crime documentaries whilst also shining a (hopefully) comedic light on a current and controversial subject matter. It had a launch screening for industry, cast and crew, and friends at the BFI last month and is now released online.

Releasing it is only the first step. How do you actually build an audience? That’s the million dollar question! Creating and releasing content regularly helps. If your sketch has a theme or subject matter that you think will be relevant to an online community, reach out to them and see if they are open to posting it to their audience. Collaborate with other individuals/groups and cross promote, hopefully helping each other and building your audiences in the process. Once you’re confident that you’ve created ‘the one’ – that sketch you feel has viral potential – and you already have a back catalogue of content, reach out to bigger online publications and ask if they’ll share it with their audience. Then if it does go down well it will hopefully have a knock on effect on your older sketches already online. And I should probably mention Comedy Crowd’s own Comedy Crowd TV channel! It’s a great new place to showcase your sketches, build an audience and meet collaborators.

Chris is the author of “A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up” (Bloomsbury Methuen. As director he has had shows at Soho Theatre, Assembly, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance, Bloomsbury Theatre and international comedy festivals. As a coach he runs stand-up comedy courses in Soho, London and also delivers sitcom and sketch comedy courses. He has run comedy writing classes for the BBC and Channel 4 and teaches sitcom and stand-up at Bath Spa University where he helped develop the new BA (Hons) Comedy degree. He also works one-to-one as director, mentor, script-editor and coach.

Steve Whiteley is an actor, character comedian and film maker. He launched his YouTube channel Offkey World in 2014, which was nominated for ‘Best Internet Programme’ at the British Comedy Awards. His 2017 Edinburgh Fringe show  ‘Wisebowm: The Struggle Is Real’, received 5 star reviews and was one of Scroobius Pips ‘Top 6 picks of the Fringe’. In 2018  ‘Wisebowm’ was commissioned as a BBC Radio 4 sitcom pilot, which will be broadcast in Summer 2019. Steve’s debut short film ‘Swiped’, which he wrote, directed and starred in was recently nominated for the 2019 Edinburgh TV Festival New Voices Award for best pilot and is online now..

By Joanna Tilley (@JoannaTilley)

I hope we can all agree that the Comedy Crowd and its weekly newsletter has brought a lot of joy into our email lives. Not only is it full of opportunities for new comedy writers, but it has links to some great inspirational articles and I think most importantly of all it feels inclusive and friendly. For me, the Comedy Crowd offers a bit of hope and camaraderie in a world where being paid to do what I love so often feels like a pipe-dream. Comedy writers may find themselves united in frustration, but united we are, and the Comedy Crowd has brought us all together – which is lovely.

At the end of 2018, the Comedy Crowd took its passion for comedy one gigantic step for mankind further by setting up a website called Punkanary. The idea of Punkanary is to provide a platform where comedy makers can showcase their work, gain a fan base and interact more with other comedy lovers. There are already over 100 shows on Punkanary and I have enjoyed watching the videos as they have rolled in over the last few months. But every now and then I see one, put my finger to my chin and think deeply, ‘Hmmmm… Interesting’.

So without further ado, here are my top 5 ‘Hmmmm… Interesting’ shows on Punkanary, thus far. Shows that if I were a comedy commissioner I might want to find out more about.

1. FIT TO DROP

Watching the shows on Punkanary made me realise something more clearly than I have done in the past. There are definitely some formats of comedy that are in vogue. And if the panel show wins this popularity contest by a landslide, then the mockumentary is ripe for second place. Fit To Drop certainly has a ‘This Country’ and ‘People Just Do Nothing’ vibe – but not just because it is a similar format – but because it is funny. Written and directed by Sarah Johnson and John Spence-Arnold, Fit To Drop zooms in on Fiona who is trying to build up a fitness empire with the help of her friends. This eight-minute pilot works because it is what so many people try to do with comedy, but fail – simple. There’s also a strong leading character and some great dialogue and visual humour. So much potential. Check it out here.

2. TALES FROM PUSSY WILLOW

I love pussy! Sorry, what I meant to say is I love Tales From Pussy Willow. This show massively feels on trend, and the part-animation look is unusual and simply pretty awesome. I admire animation because it seems like a lot of hard work, but this show plays with the form, which makes it more fun. The sketch on their Punkanary page made me laugh and I wanted more. Luckily, there’s plenty more to see on their YouTube channel, Tales from Pussy Willow. From a quick Twalk (that’s Twitter stalking, that is) of creator Kate Jessop’s page, I can see the show is already winning awards so it may be on its way. But I would recommend producers and power-folk people have a look. It’s clever. Check it out here.

3. RUINED: A HIPSTER GHOST STORY

Quite often I watch a video clip on Punkanary and think ‘boy that was great’, but would a TV commissioner take a risk on it? The sad thing is that zany, surreal, Mighty Boosh style comedy is disappearing and being replaced with depressing real world comedy-dramas. The thing I loved about Ruined: A Hipster Ghost Story is that it is suitably silly, strange and different. After a bit of Twalking, I discovered writer Lily Smith studied comedy writing at NFTS – thus I am going to assume she is a talent to watch because they rejected me twice. Anyway, I certainly felt some ‘hmmmm… interesting’ going on whilst watching it. Consider it for yerrselves here:

4. AGENT OF MISFORTUNE

During this slick trailer I definitely got the ‘hmmmm… interesting’ vibe. I like the fact there’s a no-nonsense female in the hero role and the spoof element suggests this could be a lot of fun. The trailer has been produced by Adam McNicol, who I met last year when asked to ‘star’ as an extra in a short film he was making. That also felt like a slick operation, so I am going to add one and one together and assume that there may be something in this agent and her misfortune. Check out the trailer here.

5. HOT DESK

Hot Desk is another show that feels on trend and whilst being filmed in one confined location certainly helps, the production value feels very high. The premise is nice and simple – with Andrew Neck (played by Ben Rufus Green) sitting next to a hot desk of rotating employees. With so many frustrated creatives finding themselves in ‘the boring office job to pay the bills’ scenario, this show is bound to attract an audience that empathise with the awkward situations Andrew finds himself in, and causing. There are a couple of episodes to enjoy on the Punkanary page here.

And that brings us to the end of my ‘Hmmmm… Interesting’ top-five. If you have any other suggestions of your own favourite shows please share below or with us on Twitter @punkanary @thecomedycrowd.

Also do not forget that comedy shows registered by January 31st on Punkanary will have the chance to be screened at the 2019 LOCO Comedy Film Festival at the BFI. For more information, clickedy click here.

Long live the hyperlink and goodbye!

By Joz Norris.

I’ve found this blog very difficult to write, weirdly. The initial draft essentially waxed lyrical about some of my comedy inspirations when I was growing up (Marion & Geoff and The Trip in particular) and praised the fact that neither of those were obviously mass-appeal, marketable ideas, but both of them really doubled down on creating a feeling, on telling a sad story through a comedic lens that would make the audience feel things and rethink their relationship with the world around them.

Then I talked a bit about how I’d always tried to go back to that idea with every piece of comedy I’ve ever made – the question not of “How can I make a version of this idea that as many people as possible will enjoy?” but rather “How can I make a version of this idea that communicates exactly the feeling I had that made me come up with it?” And then I read the whole blog back and said to myself “Oh, honestly, who cares what you think? Why does any of this matter?”

It’s tricky sometimes knowing which of the voices in your head are telling the truth. So, as I always do, I went back to the original idea of what I was trying to express in this blog and tried to work out how to neatly express that idea, with as little waffle as possible, and start it from scratch.

I guess I find myself concerned these days with the notion that “comedy,” as an idea, has an increasing overlap with an industry that seems more concerned about the creation and proliferation of content than it does about communicating and expressing original and sincerely-felt ideas. This is not a blanket rule for the comedy industry as a whole and I don’t want to imply it is – comedy is full of hard-working, brilliant people trying really hard to express ideas of incredible complexity and originality and depth. But it’s a worrying social trend that is gradually changing the way audiences approach what comedy is and what it should be doing, I think.

And that’s why I often go back to Marion & Geoff. I discovered that show at 13 and found myself glued to it every time it was on, hanging on every word of it, and laughing until I ached while also feeling this huge, yawning, abyss-like feeling opening up in my chest at the sadness of it all. The final shot where Rob Brydon walks away from his car with his kids created a feeling in me that nothing has ever repeated (until the final episode of the first series of Flowers a couple of years ago), and I think maybe put me on a collision course with the life I ended up leading.

I fell in love with the idea of comedy being this medium that didn’t exist for simple entertainment, but it existed to reframe human experience as somehow ridiculous. It could show you the saddest things in the world and show them to you as though they were somehow daft, or stupid, and open up these incredibly deep wells of feeling inside you and reframe your entire relationship with yourself. I think my whole life has been trying to catch up to that feeling, and comedy is the lens through which I do it.

Everything I’ve ever made has in some way involved my going back to that and asking myself – how do I get that feeling across through this idea? How do I create that feeling in my audience? I think because I’ve been so fixated on that question, I haven’t always succeeded. Sometimes I’ve made work that’s too wrapped up in itself, and self-indulgence is a terrible thing because at the end of the day, what you do has to be about the people watching it, not about yourself.

At the Fringe this year I went with my best friend to see Paul Currie’s show Hot Donkey. My friend hasn’t always been a fan of some of the more self-indulgent comedy shows I’ve done, but was enchanted by Paul’s show. Even though some of the content of Hot Donkey is similar to some of the take-no-prisoners weirdness-for-the-sake-of-weirdness stuff you might see in a more self-indulgent show (pouring milk into somebody’s belly-button, say), the whole thing is done with so much obvious love and care and respect for his audience that you never feel for even one second that what Paul is doing is being done for anybody’s benefit but yours. But I would challenge anybody who saw Hot Donkey to come away from it and not agree that that show was created in order to express a very specific feeling that Paul himself felt very intensely.

I recently shot a comedy pilot of a script I’d developed and co-written with anti-comedy legend Ed Aczel, one of the most naturally funny people in the world, which was sponsored by Tiger Aspect. Their involvement came off the back of a previous short me and Ed made in which we played two sweet, stupid, ineffectual, harmless idiots wandering around not knowing what they were doing, achieving nothing and having no impact on anybody else’s lives whatsoever, and then it ended. There were no jokes to speak of, and nothing that on paper seemed very funny. But what it did do was perfectly articulate the notion that was always at the centre of what I do – that people are ridiculous, and nothing matters very much.

It’s the first time a big production company has become directly involved in going into production on an idea of mine, and granted, I’m a long way off actually making a whole comedy series of my own yet, but it meant a lot to me that this show of commitment on their part didn’t come off the back of a lot of hustling or a concerted attempt to make something popular with an obvious in-built audience of its own. It came off the back of me and Ed trying to make something quite sincere, that worried about what it was trying to say first, and about what other people would think of it second, if at all.

Again, I still don’t really know what I’m trying to say with this blog. I think we’re at a point where it’s easy to think that comedy is about being relatable, or popular, or making things that speak to as many people as possible. And on the occasions where I’ve become too self-reflective, too insular and too insistent on my own ideas, I’ve been hugely indebted to the producers, directors and collaborators I’ve worked with who’ve brought me back to earth and reminded me to consider other people and figure out how to make an idea accessible to them. But I also think the most important thing is the feeling you had in your heart and your chest when you first decided to do this, and that’s what everything has to come back to.

I’ll try to sum it all up in a nutshell with a recent experience – a few weeks ago I had a bad customer service experience and was ranting to a housemate about it. I was midway through the sentence “They couldn’t even be bothered to apologise,” and was at peak frustration, when I dropped a sealed carton of orange juice I was holding, which landed pointlessly on the ground with a dull thud, and I had to temporarily stop being angry, kneel down and pick it up. I felt in that instant the most piercing version of that same feeling that I’ve ever felt.

It turns out I didn’t need to be making all this stuff for all this time – the same inherent sense of how ludicrous we all are, and how little we ought to be worrying about things, can be summed up in a second of misplaced frustration and simultaneous clumsiness. So my new rule is – if what I make doesn’t make me feel like I just dropped some orange juice while ranting about a bad customer service experience, I don’t see the point in making it. I hope everybody works to similar rules.

http://www.joznorris.co.uk/

@JozNorris

Facebook: Joz Norris Comedy

By Stevie Cooke.

I’m the first to admit, I’m a submissions junkie. If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend your time trawling through the internet finding any open opportunities that might be suitable for your work. Or not – sometimes I’m not fussy, I’ll enter anything just to get that submissions high…

A few years back, while endlessly searching for hits, I started to notice that theatre had loads more open opportunities than TV, film or radio. And specifically loads of things called scratch. I know right, what the hell is scratch theatre?

Well it turns out, it’s not theatre for the itchy, but an odd name for a great kind of theatre that all writers should get involved with.

The basic format of a scratch theatre piece is it’s around ten minutes long, no set, minimal props and a small cast of two or three – so you can see why it lends itself to comedy. On the night, the actors will have rehearsed for a few hours before with a director and will be reading from a script. A scratch night usually showcases around eight to ten short plays in an evening. The idea of scratch is that it’s a sounding ground for new material, a chance to see work on its legs in front of a real audience.

So one day, while I was trawling, I decided to submit a surreal comedy two-hander to a scratch night, and for the first time ever, I saw my writing performed. And that was it. I was hooked.

Page To Stage – the scratch night where I first saw my work live (21st April 2016)

As a writer who feels instantly nauseated at the idea of performing, it can be hard to find ways to get your work in front of people. Through scratch I learned so much that I couldn’t learn from the page – like which jokes land well, how many words an actor can get out before needing a breath (not as many as you can type), and the places where people laugh accidentally (it was a serious moment guys!).

But scratch nights are also one of the best ways to discover actors and directors who get your work and can help bring it alive. I am still working with an actor who performed in that first scratch piece all these years later.

After doing the rounds for a bit, I decided to take the plunge and see what it would be like to put on a scratch night myself. It was hard work, but also a hell of a lot of fun. All you need is a room above a pub, scripts, actors, directors and most importantly, some friends who will come along to help you drink enough on the evening so the room above the pub is free. And there you have yourself a scratch night.

One of the great things about putting on a scratch night yourself is it allows you access to opportunities where there might not be so many, and the control of putting on your own work. Although that said, scratch night opportunities come up frequently in all big cities – they’re not just for us Londoners. Now you know what they are, you’ll start seeing them everywhere.

But the inevitable cost of putting on a scratch night is that your ego will get thirsty and you’ll need a bigger hit. Hence why myself and another scratch devotee thought it would be a good idea to move onto writing and producing our own full length show. It’s not easy, but we’re proof that you can prise open doors to the industry yourself. All you need is endless positivity and enthusiasm to see you through. And friends to turn up to see your shows.

So, ahem, self-promotion warning – if you fancy coming along and seeing our full-length production that celebrates the last 100 Years of women’s rights, that started from the humble beginnings of scratch, we’d love to see you there. And not just because we need to put a lot of money behind the bar…

By Stevie Cooke – @steviecooke1985

100 Years – Monday 3^rd December, Southwark Playhouse, London.

Three thirty-minute plays come together to create a unique evening of theatre that explores the last century of women’s rights. Stevie’s piece ‘The Flour Girls’ is a surreal comedy that looks at the night in 1970 when British feminists flour-bombed the Miss World contest – from the perspective of two bags of flour…

Tickets: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/events/100-years/

Sounds like the dream right? Brooke, Caitlin, Carrie and Fiona make up Belladonna Comedy. They run their own popular satire website and are shortly releasing their first book “New Erotica for Feminists”.

We had the pleasure of catching up with them and finding out how they did it. There’s some great advice in here for new creators, and their story is a brilliant example of using modern media creatively to break into comedy. Here’s the Q&A:

So how did The Belladonna get started and what’s it all about?

The Belladonna is a satire site (www.thebelladonnacomedy.com) we launched in February 2017, “by women and non-binary authors, for everyone.”

We were each part of a private Facebook group for female comedy writers, and there was increasing discussion about how there seemed to be a dearth of reputable satire sites that accepted outside submissions from contributors (this was around the time The Toast, National Lampoon and The Onion’s celebrity gossip site StarWipe stopped publishing, and Reductress stopped accepting outside pitches in favour of sourcing new writers by seasonal packets), and even fewer that celebrated or nurtured women’s talents and voices.

A number of members in that group mentioned they’d stopped writing comedy entirely, because their early efforts had been met with unnecessarily cliquish or exclusionary behavior, or negative feedback, or no feedback at all. Other members had occasionally piped in to suggest that women from that group should start their own publication, but no one had taken the reins.

Then in November 2016, Carrie Wittmer posted “I want to start a website, who wants to start one?” Fellow writers Caitlin Kunkel and Fiona Taylor responded with interest, an email chain was started, and Caitlin brought in Brooke Preston (who Caitlin knew and had previously taught) to complete the team.

We set to work immediately, setting up the site’s infrastructure and branding (by illustrator extraordinaire Marlowe Dobbe: http://marlowe.dobbe.com/) and building an initial handful of trusted contributors, before launching in February 2017. We’ve been steadily growing and publishing since (and performing, having created Belladonna Variety Hours all around the Eastern US) to our current fanbase of roughly 35,000 worldwide.

Why did you choose to host it on Medium?

Medium provided us a free and relatively unencumbered way to manage an independently branded site, with many contributors, with next to no start-up costs. We paid for our domain name (which points back to the Medium site for now), our brand suite, and a few other modest (and optional) costs, but Medium allowed us to hit the ground running. There’s also no coding required, it’s all relatively simple on the front and back end, with a wide range of metrics to gauge a piece’s success.

That said, we’ve always considered this just our first home rather than our permanent home–we’re working toward migrating to our own site where we can accept ads and not be at the mercy of Medium’s often shifting business model.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve experienced running The Belladonna?

Like most satire editors we know, we each have another other day job or five. We haven’t yet monetized the site (though it’s something we’re always discussing and planning for) or moved from Medium, so none of us makes a dime from the site just yet. We also put the lion’s share of income from our events back into the site’s expenses at this stage. So we’re carving out time from our already busy work and life (and now book!) schedules to make this happen, because it’s something we feel extremely passionate about, and also we possess insatiable cravings for debt and insomnia.

What positive impacts has it had?

The very best part of creating The Belladonna has been the chance to give a platform to so many wildly talented writers, at all stages of their careers, from so many backgrounds. To date, we’ve published well over 200 writers on the site–ranging from some of satire’s top names like Riane Konc (The New Yorker) and Kimberly Harrington (author of Amateur Hour) to many who earned their first-ever byline with us. We also provide a private Facebook group where writers published on our site can share bylines, opportunities, meetups, feedback requests and encouragement with one another, a newsletter to anyone who pitches us full of resources and advice, and constructive feedback on every submission.

We regularly get emails from submitters who write to thank us for sending them the nicest rejection letters they’ve ever received, which spurred them to keep going. We don’t sugarcoat the truth, but we believe in kindness, tact and helping women and non-binary writers, and seeing a writer feel empowered and strengthened even in a rejection from us makes us proud of what we’re building together. Each rejection from us should be a step toward writing your next great piece.

What is the landscape looking like at the moment for online comedy writing?

Well, it’s 2018 in America, so we’re all sort of figuring out the best way to parody the never-ending dumpster fire in which we’re now forced to live our daily lives. (I believe you call those “skip fires” in the UK). Beyond that, we’ve been encouraged to see a number of great, mutually supportive satire publications on the rise, like Weekly Humorist, Points in Case, Little Old Lady Comedy, Slackjaw, Flexx Mag, RAZED, WhoHaHa and many others. And iconic old guard sites like McSweeney’s are seeing record traffic and reaching long-time monetization goals.

We’re also seeing a wider swath of non-satire publications open to running online satire pieces, from Real Simple to Parents to Men’s Health. (Plus, those places tend to pay!). Two of us (Caitlin Kunkel, who created the program, and Brooke Preston) teach satire writing on the faculty of the famed Second City, where full class sections of eager students try their hand at satire each month. So the talented writers are there, and the audience is there, and good God, the satirical targets are there, but there’s still a lot of question marks in terms of the best way to monetize and sustain a site long-term in a way that can pay staff and contributors alike.

So your book is “New Erotica for Feminists.” Got to ask, why did you choose to write about this topic?

It’s something closer to ‘the topic chose us.’ We were deep in daydream schemes about how to potentially monetize The Belladonna (a frequent topic of conversation for us), cheekily dreaming about having our favorite flavored sparkling water company (LaCroix–wildly popular in the US, a real cult following) somehow just foot the bill for everything and send us truck (lorry) upon lorry of the stuff. And why not have, say, Tom Hardy make those deliveries? Is that not how corporate sponsorship works? Perhaps we don’t understand commerce after all. One of us said (in jest) ‘you know, that’s our million dollar idea–that sounds like erotica the women of New York would pay good money for’. We decided then and there to write a comedy piece in that vein–what would erotica for feminist women look like–and it flowed out of us so quickly and naturally as we realized all the ways actual romance and porn tropes are in service to traditionally cisgender male desires and urges, and the women are largely there as objects to be had rather than protagonists.

Which groups of people are the biggest fans of the content and do you engage with them directly?

We like to say the book is for “feminists and those who love them” (who should ideally also then be feminists). We’ve had a number of men pick up the book with a comment like “I know I’m not the target audience for this” but once they read it, they totally get what we’re trying to do, and find it just as funny as the women do. If you believe women should have equal rights and enjoy comedy, you’re our target demographic.

That said, a number of Americans have committed to mailing a copy to their mean old Republican Senators as a kind of troll move, an unorthodox application of the book we nonetheless deeply support.

What did the book publishers want to see when they approached you and how was the process of securing the deal?

We were incredibly fortunate in that our UK publisher first approached us after reading the McSweeney’s piece. We had about a week’s worth of conversations and then a deal was struck. We realize how very privileged we are and how rarely that happens.

The US side of things was slightly more involved, as we had to shop ourselves around to try and land a parallel deal for the same book, ideally on the same timeline. First off, publishers wanted to see an idea that a lot of people had already connected to. So we had that part down with the mega-viral success of the original McSweeney’s piece – we had developed a premise that we felt we could write endless jokes on, and we had social proof that people connected to it. They also wanted to see some evidence of platform or reach, to show we had enough of a following to make noise around the launch and compel people to buy books. Between The Belladonna, McSweeney’s (in which the original article appeared) and The Second City where Brooke and Caitlin teach, we met that threshold. It’s important to think of platform not only as one’s own site or blog but also all the tangentially related people and places who are guaranteed to get involved in promoting your book. So if you work for a BBC show that you know would help you promote your book, or help organize a comedy festival with a large social footprint, even if it isn’t directly related, publishers might include those as part of your platform.

In addition to that, they also wanted to see a (mini–still nearly 80 pages!) book proposal. That’s a document that lays out a LOT of information, like how we would expand the original sub-1,000 word piece into a 12,000 word book, comparable titles and how they sold, our platform collectively on The Belladonna and individually, and our thoughts on who the audience for the book was, advance blurbs and more.

Our shorthand for who should buy it is “feminists and those who love them.” Basically, if you believe that there are inherent inequalities in society that need to be addressed, and you want to both laugh and fume at the same time, we highly recommend this book. We think the jokes and situations we satirize will be familiar to a lot of people, whether the twist is having a doctor finally believe your pain, or a version of the Genesis story where Eve doesn’t listen to a talking snake, or just that someone breastfeeds in public and no one cares. You know, things that are currently fantasies. In fact, the entire US title for the book is “New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay.”

We were fortunate in that there was large interest from US publishers, and in one magical week we met with them all and heard about their vision for the book, the promo, timeline, and how they would reach out to people. We then received bids and our agent helped us to select our final publisher. It happened very quickly – we wrote the piece in February, and by the end of March we had written the proposal sent it out, met with everyone, picked a publisher, and signed out contract. It was heady and surreal but also VERY exhausting, since we were all still working full-time jobs the whole time!

What one tip you would give yourself as an aspiring comedy writer starting out now?

Trust that the opportunities will appear when you are good enough to take full advantage of them. So rather than focusing on getting representation, or someone to send you the SNL packet right after you learn to write a sketch, focus on writing and creating work in a variety of media, and then finding the best way to showcase it.

None of us would have been ready for this book opportunity and the incredibly fast writing and editing schedule if we hadn’t been writing on deadline for years, and editing on our own site for a year and a half at that point. It was the quality of the initial piece that got us meetings, but the professionalism of our proposal and presence in those meetings (as well as the years of work we’d put into building strong personal and collective portfolios and platforms of work) that led to our deals.

This takes the pressure off younger writers, because all they have to do is to focus on writing the best work they can, consistently, rather than focusing on excessive networking and the opportunities other writers seem to be getting.

Also, do everything you can to lift up other talented writers and performers. Adopt a “community, not competition” mindset. When your friends are successful, they’re likely to hire their trusted friends. And when you’re successful, you’ll need trusted collaborators to make your vision reality and to help enthusiastically spread the word about it.

Start now by helping people without asking for anything in return, building relationships and making yourself known as a great, reliable collaborator.

Where can people find your book?

In the UK: Waterstones, Amazon, Apple Books, Sceptre’s website, independent booksellers and (in theory at least) everywhere books are sold. Ask your local bookseller to carry it!

In the US: Amazon, Apple Books, Penguin Random House’s website, Walmart.com (online for certain, in-store tbd), and a wide range of independent bookstores, including, Powell’s Books, Women and Children First, Politics & Prose, Books and Books, The Book Loft, Little Professor Book Center, The Ripped Bodice and more.

Brooke Preston, Caitlin Kunkel, Carrie Wittmer, Fiona Taylor are the Founders and Editors of The Belladonna and authors of the satire book “New Erotica for Feminists“, out Nov. 15 in the UK and Australia on Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton) and Nov. 13 in the US on Plume (Penguin Random House).

By Jon Holmes.

In 2017 comedian Hari Kondabolu created the documentary “The Problem With Apu“. It was a made-for-TV doc that addressed the racial incoherence of a fictional character: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.

While I don’t claim to be of any sort of minority, I certainly always admired The Simpsons and still to this day will cite the show as my comedy upbringing… Although I haven’t seen the show for many years now I never personally believed there was an issue with Apu. In fact, rather I saw him as a character that was there to educate viewers in amongst a town full of clowns (and not to mention, numerous other stereotypes).

This was a character who in my time watching the programme had helped me to understand immigration, veganism, and arranged marriages – topics only whispered in the early 90/00s, which all seem more topical than ever right now. I would go in to watching The Problem With Apu with a feeling of “Did This Really Need to Get Made?” – I certainly recognised the issues that a character like Apu will bring and understood why people would find them triggering, but my dilemma came from me actually rather liking the learned father and business owner, and I couldn’t help but think that other, more deserving shows could be accused of misusing minorities for the sake of a cheap gag (The Big Bang Theory for one).

With that being said, The Problem with Apu made a huge splash: Everyone was talking about it: The Simpsons unofficially responded to the issue with an off the cuff visual gag that no-one would enjoy; Apu voice actor, Hank Azaria would go on to discuss it on Colbert, and Matt Groening released this half-assed statement.

“The Simpsons is sick and this contest is crowdsourcing the cure.”

Rather like Comic Book Guy exclaiming “Worst. Episode. Ever”, regularly I will go on to Twitter to vent about how poor and unimportant I believe current day Simpsons is – a mere ghost of its former self that diminishes its own legacy with each new and unfunny season. A show that refuses to die: A boxer that just won’t retire, a programme with food on its face that everyone else laughs at – and no longer with. Shankar was right. The Simpsons was sick. But this sickness would take the form of common old age.

No, I didn’t approach this as a man offended by a character; but rather a former fan, disgruntled by the show’s serious lack of care in handling a scenario like this, the tornado of outrage that had come from this 30 minute film and the show responding to it in such a blasé way was what drove me to writing my script.

It had reminded me of what a pathetic yellow bellied (- that was intentional) animal The Simpsons really is these days. Before I had ignored the show for its lack of relevance but now in the limelight due to angered fans with a voice, rather than deal with the issue in a jovial and satirical way like they used to on a weekly basis, the show instead surrounded itself with yet another shitty joke that bit in to the honeydew of nostalgia – and was met only by chirping crickets.

I went in to this particular script competition with a dogged determination to get the “voice” of the character, and to give him a fitting and just ending. One that a show that has been on the air for longer than I have been alive would be proud of. An ending that would easily slot in to the lore of The Simpsons, whilst being respectful to the people who the character had hurt.

My first steps were rewatching all of the main Apu episodes. I made up a small list on the back of a notepad that I had stolen from a previous job, which I’m sure read something like a haiku from a serial killer:

JAMES WOODS

APU GETS MARRIED

22 SHORTS ABOUT SPRINGFIELD

EIGHT BABIES

VALENTINES DAY

PAUL MCCARTNEY

This helped refresh the character in my head again (and hey, gave me an excuse to watch golden age episodes and claim they were “research”).

I always knew that I didn’t want to physically kill the character – it seemed (ironically) disrespectful, somehow. I, as a previous fan, felt the character deserved more of a send-off than being squashed by an anvil. No, I knew that in my script, Apu would simply leave the town behind. Springfield and Apu were both far different entities than when they had begun. The two had evolved, and outgrown each other. I knew that I would have to incorporate that in there, and really try to hit the bittersweet beats of the character never being seen again.

As a white, straight man from Bristol, during the blocked times, struggling to figure out what to do with the next scene, I would regularly have second-thoughts where I would question even if I was the correct kind of person to write a piece of this subject material. Eventually coming to the conclusion that anyone should be writing a story like this; providing it was dealt with in a respectful and, more importantly, hysterical way. It didn’t matter where the voice was originally coming from, as long as it was good.

I knew that this was a personal story for me as such a big fan, and I had to approach it from that angle. I knew that as I put that final full stop, it was the last I would ever see of the character, having in my mind, written the last line of dialog that Apu would ever say. I knew from that moment that I’d also retired The Simpsons in its entirety for myself as well.

I sent the script and didn’t think much of it. This was a worldwide callout, and just writing for an already existing show was a cool experience in itself.

Eventually I received an email telling me that I had been shortlisted as a finalist – of two hundred scripts, my piece, titled “Who Really Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?” had made it to the top 15%.

Months passed… I waited, and worked on other projects… the deadline would be pushed back… and then finally last week I received an email from the competition organisers telling me that I hadn’t gotten it. Gradually, as time passed, it began to hurt the more that I thought about it – but this is just how competitions work. I have no regret or bitterness towards the winner, and offer them my congratulations with their success. I know that Mr Shankar is going to make something really damn special – something that I anticipate just like I would have done with any other new episodes in The Simpsons’ glory days.

ComedyWire has been kind enough to let me attach the spec script that I sent to the competition below, which can be read on here for free.

Jon Holmes

By Chris Head

I coach and direct stand-up and am the author of “A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up”. Meanwhile I have an annual gig working with undergraduates at Bath Spa University to develop a multi-cam studio sitcom, I coach writers and I am about to script-edit a BBC Radio 4 sitcom pilot. One thing that looms large in all this work on sitcom is plotting which I discuss in this piece looking at the ‘set-pieces’ method.

I also deliver coaching and script/pitch consultations with former BBC commissioner/ head of comedy at Sky and now TV producer Lucy Lumsden. We have an online course coming up on creating, writing and pitching sitcom where we’ll work on your characters, situation, plotting and your pitch. More info here).

Qualities of a good plot

I always think that a good sitcom plot has some or all of these qualities:

– A clear goal for the central character and obstacles that stop them achieving it

– bad decisions

– a plot that escalates with every scene upping the ante

– dramatic irony (where the audience know things character(s) don’t)

– lies and secrets

– misunderstandings

– a false dawn (it seems like everything is sorted… then it isn’t)

– a winner / a loser

This is a good check list as you work through your own developing plot. How many of these does your plot feature? Taking a step back, how might you build a plot in the first place?

One approach is simply to give your characters a plausible problem and then the comedy comes from the dysfunctional way they set about dealing with it. (For instance there is a dead body in the hotel that needs removing sensitively). Or you might think of the biggest embarrassment or disaster and work backwards from that climactic point to the start (Peep Show writers Bains & Armstrong were geniuses at this approach.) Or, as Graham Linehan is wont to do, you might plot around set-pieces.

Plotting using set-pieces

Set-pieces are the big funny scenes that the narrative revolves around. In this method of plotting you set about writing as many of these set-pieces as you can think of. It’s essentially like writing a series of sketches for your characters. David Renwick made good use of this approach in plotting One Foot in the Grave. Think about scenes like Victor going to buy some second-hand shoes and discovering they’re still on the feet of the deceased former owner. Or Victor discovering the dog he has been preparing to adopt is in fact dead and stuffed. These are essentially sketches.

Once you have your set-piece scenes, you can then pick one and think about how it might form part of a wider narrative. To illustrate this, here is a set-piece scene from a notional sitcom that I have written for illustration (using my model of how scenes and sketches unfold):

SET-UP: Middle-aged, theatrical Sadie is confirming an appointment on the phone to have her nails done. As she hangs up her daughter Mel enters. (Note the dramatic irony – we know about the nail appointment but Mel doesn’t). Mel asks if Sadie can stay at home and wait for the new fridge to be delivered as she needs to go out and meet a possible investor for her business idea.

REVEAL: Sadie says no because she has an important appointment herself and anyway only Mel is capable of making sure the fridge is the right model and that it has come with all the parts.

ESCALATION: Mel argues that surely Sadie would be capable. She offers to show her the specification of the fridge and all the questions to ask. Sadie plays dumb and struggles with the simple information. In the end Mel gives up and says she’ll stay at home and will rearrange the meeting.

PAYOFF: Sadie’s friend Trudy comes in to take her to the nail place. Mel is aghast at how she’s been manipulated and how her mother’s nails take precedence over her business idea.

This is a set-piece scene. So I have established in this scene that mother and daughter live together. We know that Mel has a business idea, so let’s say Mel is living at home to save money while she attempts to get a business idea off the ground. The only problem being that her self-obsessed mother keeps ruining things for her. In this way I am discovering more about the situation by writing scenes.

Now we have this set-piece we can think about what happens before and after it. For instance, here I have written outlines of scenes to take place either side of the set-piece.

BEFORE

Scene 1: Mel is having breakfast, looking at messages on her phone. Sadie enters. Mel starts telling Sadie that she has been messaged by a possible investor for her new business idea. Sadie retorts that anyone would be mad to invest in her idea; who needs an app to tell them how long they’ve cleaned their teeth for? Mel (for the umpeenth time) starts explaining how it’ll improve dental hygiene and how it’s part of the ‘gamification’ of life, when Sadie freaks out because the fridge is broken. She simply cannot have warm orange juice at breakfast time!

SET-PIECE

Scene 2: The set-piece described above where Sadie gets her daughter to stay in to receive the new fridge (thus missing the meeting with her potential investor) while she, Sadie, has her nails done.

AFTER

Scene 3: Mel is on the phone to the investor. It’s clearly a delicate matter to reschedule the meeting. She’s only in the country for two days and wants to meet face-to-face. Then the doorbell rings and Mel has to open the door to the fridge delivery guy. As per Sadie’s instructions Mel has to unpack the fridge and check the contents of the package; much to the annoyance of the delivery man who has a tight schedule. This also makes the discussion with the investor more complicated as Mel tries to juggle the two things. Mel discovers one of the shelves seems to be missing and starts to check the rest of the (massive amount of) packaging. She hands the phone to the delivery guy and he and the investor end up having a nice chat about fridge models.

Notice here that we’re figuring out the plotting first. Actually writing the scenes will be the next stage and is much more effective and efficient with this scaffolding in place.

Plot lines

Notice how in the above we also have two plot lines: the A plot and the B plot. The A plot is the main story and takes the lion’s share of the screen time (in this case Mel chasing an investor). The B plot is a secondary strand that has less screen time and unfolds alongside the A plot (the fridge situation). Here there also seems to be the beginnings of a C plot which I might develop; namely the mother getting her nails done. So this is how our plot is breaking down:

A PLOT – Mel’s teeth cleaning app business idea and the courting of an investor

B PLOT – the fridge

C PLOT – Sadie’s nails

Classically in sitcom plotting, the plot lines collide at the end of the episode. With this in mind I’m already starting to wonder how these threads collide. Having set up that the investor – let’s call her Stephanie – has an interest in fridges, maybe in the final scene Mel and her at last meet – in Sadie and Mel’s home – and just when the meeting about the app seems to be going well, Sadie breezes in and starts going on about how wonderful the fridge is. Stephanie’s interest switches. Sadie explains it’s a new company with an innovative design. Stephanie says she has thought of investing in fridges – hence her earlier interest. She thanks Sadie and decides to invest in a fridge start up instead of in Mel’s app.

This feels like a good finish. I now need to answer the question: why does the meeting have to happen at home? One answer could that yet again Sadie has forced Mel to stay in for some reason and so this time (thinking she has at last got round this issue), Mel invites the investor to their home. This is a false dawn. Mel thinks she has at last solved the problem of meeting the investor but as we’re about to discover it’s all going to go wrong for her.

But why is the mother so uncaring about the development of her business? Does she simply dislike her daughter? Or – in a reverse of the usual sitcom trope of the parent trying to get rid of the adult child – is she sabotaging her to keep her around? Why does she need her around? It’s in asking and answering these kinds of questions that more scenes will suggest themselves as this plot and this sitcom evolve.

Working on (or wanting to work on) a TV sitcom script? Chris is working with TV producer, former BBC Comedy Commissioner/ Head of Comedy at Sky Lucy Lumsden. Together they’re leading an online course on the art, craft and business of TV sitcom. Great writing coaching, script development and invaluable horse’s mouth industry insights:

https://www.chrishead.com/events/the-art-craft-business-of-tv-sitcom-with-chris-head-lucy-lumsden-3

And you can read chapter 1 of Chris’s stand-up book for free here:

https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5b6331436b2f0700011dd33b

Or buy your own copy of the book here:

A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-Up

By Jon Ornoy, Producer and Director, Animal Mother Films.

As an independent producer, figuring out how to do a lot with a little is pretty much the name of the game, and as I now embark on producing my first narrative feature film that maxim is only proving more true. The other guiding principle that I have always followed with my work is that I’d rather take on a smaller project and achieve it at 100% of my capabilities instead of attempting something more ambitious, over-extending my resources, and ending up with a product that doesn’t quite hit the mark.

I had these ideas very much in mind when I first optioned James Pickering’s script for All Joking Aside. I recognized in the script an eminently scalable project that could work with almost any budget I’d be able to raise, without affecting its core strength which is the relationship between the main characters of Charlene and Bob.

Set in the world of New York’s stand-up comedy scene, the film tells the story of a young woman pursuing her dreams of becoming a comedian, and the unlikely friendship and mentorship she finds with the jaded, former comic, who heckles her off the stage at her first open mic night. No one has any superpowers, there aren’t any mobsters, and Charlene never gets naked, but nonetheless, I feel that the film will have a strong mainstream appeal. This is a very conscious content choice for the first of what I hope will be many future feature film projects.

Taking Advantage of Infrastructure

I’m fortunate to live in Vancouver, Canada, where film and TV production has exploded over the last few decades into an industry worth C$3.4 billion a year, and employs around 60,000 people (like myself). While the majority of that production is in the form of shows from the US, the trickle-down benefits are significant for indie filmmakers, who get to benefit from a diverse selection of rental houses competing for business, and a very deep talent pool of artists and technicians who have been trained by Hollywood. While I can’t compete with the wages that these larger productions offer, we can provide opportunities for crew to gain experience in more senior positions within their departments, which they can later parlay into advancement within their unions.

We are intentionally shooting the film in February when the industry is traditionally at its quietest and crew is more readily available to take advantage of an opportunity. So while we will be providing some value in return for people’s time, I still think it’s really important to show your appreciation for the many days they’ll be giving to the production, which to me means a) doing as much of the prep work as I can in all departments, and b) feeding people as well as we possibly can.

Create Your Own Funding Opportunities

Apart from casting, the biggest thing that’s occupying us right now is the planning for the crowdfunding campaign that we’re launching October 10th to close the last piece of our production financing.

With the range of excellent DIY alternatives to Kickstarter and Indiegogo now available, we have chosen to bypass those sites, and are building our own WordPress site with a Woo-commerce plugin that will handle all of the perks and transactions. Our feeling is that unless we’re fortunate enough to get featured on the homepage of one of those big platforms, and can benefit from the extra exposure that can offer, we will be driving all of the traffic to our page, so why give up a percentage of our hard-earned dollars or even risk getting nothing at all if we don’t hit our target?

This way we have customized the campaign to our needs, keeping our audience focused on our website, AllJokingAsideMovie.com, as the one central repository for everything you want to know about the movie. The money notwithstanding, the other big benefit of going through this process is the way it forces you to hone in on your target audience and messaging to them, which are investments that pay off significantly once it’s time to send the film to market.

Don’t Give Up

Making a movie is always an exciting and nerve-wracking affair, especially when you’ve got a bunch of your own money on the line, but just like the comedians we’re portraying onscreen, once you’ve been bitten by the bug it’s really hard to get it out of your system. Please stop by the site anytime to see how things are coming along for us, and best of luck to all of you out there making your own films.

By Chris Head. So you want to create a comedy character. Perhaps it’s a character for you to perform or for a sitcom/comedy drama script. In this blog I am particularly thinking of narrative comedy script characters, but these thoughts can be equally useful for sketch characters and so on. Here are some ways you can explore and develop your characters to make them as rich and comedic as possible.

Base your characters on real people

Characters are fleshed out and made individual by drawing on the qualities of real people you know or have encountered. Whether they’re neighbours, bosses, colleagues, friends, family members or even spouses, real life offers up an abundance of eccentric and dysfunctional people who can become comedy characters. When you have a real model behind the character they become more individual, believable and idiosyncratic.

You might base a character on someone close to you, your nearest and dearest, however, if you’re basing a character on someone you know less well, or even have only seen fleetingly, there’s a lot you don’t know and you are fee to invent to fill in the gaps. If you don’t have a real-life model (or models) in mind you are more likely to draw on stereotype and cliché.

You can draw on a number of real people to flesh out your character picking up on their mannerisms, speech patterns, attitudes, beliefs as well as their biography and life experience. Since you’re fictionalizing, do feel free to do them a terrible disservice and focus on and exaggerate all their worst qualities. And in terms of their biography, if they’ve done three really stupid things in the last five years, your character version of them will have done those three stupid things in the last three weeks – of if they’re a real klutz, in the last three days. Then once you have identified the kinds of stupid things the real person does, you can invent more in a similar vein for your character.

Positives and negatives

Let’s think about basing a character on a bad boss you have had in your working life. Maybe you have one now! It can be brilliantly cathartic to take these dreadful people and turn them into comedy characters. Your characters have a problem or a goal and they set about trying to get what they want with their limited skill set. They don’t have the skills, knowledge or ability to effectively achieve their goals, but still they try. (Just like your bad boss). A first question to ask of your boss is: What’s wrong with them?

This will be where the comedy lies. All their negative qualities, failings and shortcomings. Have a clear, short list of these issues. This is enough to get started. A next step to ask is: Who else do I know who’s like this? Now you are drawing on bad qualities of other people to make this character even worse.

Then having considered your boss’ negative sides ask: What’s right with them? If you really despise them or find them totally contemptible, this can be tricky! They must have some positive qualities. What are they? A balance of positives and negatives makes the character more rounded and engaging – even if the negatives are likely to dominate with many characters, that bit of humanity is important. For instance with Basil Fawlty (who was based on a Mr Sinclair who ran the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay with his terrifying wife):

Basil Fawlty

Negatives: Petty, vindictive, snobbish

Positives: Witty, resourceful, intelligent

We so enjoy the comedy of his negative qualities it’s easy to overlook the positives but they are there. Sybil loved him once! Like Basil, your character might also use their positives to negative ends. For example, Basil’s biting wit is often deployed at the expense of the guests he should be deferential to. His resourcefulness meanwhile, which could be employed in improving the hotel, ends up being channelled into managing the increasingly absurd situations he creates.

Note that it’s absurd situations that he creates. I see a lot of early drafts of scripts and a common shortcoming is that stuff just happens to the characters. As a rule, it’s so much stronger when the comedy comes from characters making bad decisions, or making bold decisions they are ill equipped to deal with the fallout from. For example, in the pilot of Friends, Rachel walks out on her wedding rather than being left at the altar by the groom.

With positive and negative sides, the negatives will be why we find them funny but the positives will be why we warm to them nevertheless. A dialogue exercise you can try is to start an interaction with another character in one of their positives and the flip to one of the negatives. In the opening minutes of Friends, Joey says to Ross (in response to hearing about his painful breakup):

Joey: Alright Ross, look. You’re feeling a lot of pain right now. You’re angry. You’re hurting. Can I tell you what the answer is?

(Ross gestures his consent.)

Joey: Strip joint! C’mon, you’re single! Have some hormones!

Here we see Joey start off in an empathic, caring tone… before he flips to being crude. This is a key part of finding funny moments in dialogue. The first sentence misdirects as to where he is going and the second sentence flips our expectation. And it’s a flip from positive to negative. Here’s a made up example from a teacher character speaking to a student: “I see you’ve produced your homework on time which I appreciate. Just a shame it looks like it was written by a monkey”.

You can do this selfsame process of exploring the negatives and positives with a difficult or ridiculous friend, relative or co-worker. Or a relative, spouse or sibling. Or even… yourself. Yes you can become a character in your own narrative. To help come up with positives and negatives, I have produced a table for 108 positive qualities and 108 negative that is on p.5 – 6 of my ‘Creating Comedy Narratives For Stage & Screen‘ book.

Two perspectives on your characters

Here’s another way of looking at your character from two perspectives: firstly, describe how they see themselves and secondly how others see them. If there is very little difference between these two perspectives then that would be a self-aware, functional person. The bigger the difference the more comic and/or tragic the character. Steve Coogan’s appallingly brilliant Alan Partridge, for example, was based on a number of real-life British TV presenters. Many potential models for Partridge have been identified but (fortunately) there isn’t one single person who embodies all of Partridge’s traits, so it’s very much an amalgamation of different individuals and Coogan says there is a lot of himself in Partridge too. Here’s how you might describe Alan Partridge in this way:

How Alan Partridge sees himself: Charming, funny, relaxed, professional, friendly, popular

How others see him: Petty, vindictive, neurotic, incompetent, loathsome, moribund

When you’re developing a character, think in terms of the first list as how they see themselves when they’re at their most self-regarding and the second list as how others see them when they are most critical. This creates a persona and a shadow. List 1 is the persona they try and project, list 2 is the shadow that undermines and contradicts the persona. Think about THE GAP between how characters see themselves and how others see them – the bigger the gap, the greater the comedy (and tragedy) of the character.

Here’s an example from Alan Partridge where he flips from positive to negative as Joey does above:

“I’d just like to fly a helicopter all around Norfolk. You know, swoop down over a field….” So far it sounds like a love of the landscape and natural beauty… but then it flips: “Scare a donkey so that it falls into a river. Hover over one of those annoying families that go on holidays on bikes. And shout at them “get out of the area!” and watch them panic!”

To explore this in action, try writing a scene where the character is trying to embody a quality or qualities from the first list while their efforts are undermined by qualities from the second list. In order for this to happen, think about a situation that will bring out their worst sides. Here is an example from Alan Partridge where he is DJ’ing on Radio Norfolk. On the one hand in his DJ role he is wanting to project professionalism and knowledgeable enthusiasm for the music… but he can’t help being petty and judgemental.

“That was ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains they ‘Paved paradise to put up a parking lot’, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song.”

Likeability of characters

Often writers get feedback that their characters aren’t likeable enough and yet at the same time there are often sitcoms with characters who behave badly and aren’t obviously likeable. And yet so many viewers have an appalled fascination with the truly dark characters, for example Julia Davis with Jill from Nighty Night. Returning to the point made about basing characters on real people, even Julia Davis’s horrific creations are, as she says, based on people. She described Jill as the ultimate extreme narcissist and sociopath, and acknowledges they’re traits she’s interested in and that run through a lot of her characters. She says she does see such people around and continues to be shocked by their behaviour and wants to keep looking at it from a slightly different perspective each time.

You couldn’t however have a cast made up entirely of these extreme types. Imagine if Jill, Basil and Alan Partridge were all in one show! They’d cancel each other out. You need the reasonable and normal people around them for contrast but also to create a way in for the audience. We sympathize with those people. And indeed we need characters who are holding it together.

Developing an ensemble of characters

Once you have one clear character with strongly defined positives and negatives, to create another character – simply make them the polar opposite of the original character. Comedy thrives on opposites. Spontaneous, brave, outrageous Fleabag is paired with a total opposite in her sister Claire who is uptight, cautious and anal. When I was growing up I used to love watching Ever Decreasing Circles where dour, controlling, obsessive Martin is contrasted with his neighbour, the dashing, freewheeling, charming Paul. In fact, all of your characters should be strongly contrasting, with no two characters having the same characteristics.

When putting together your ensemble of characters, it helps to think in terms of BOSSES, STRIVERS, FOOLS and FOILS. I have developed my own Boss/ Striver/ Fool – and foil – model of sitcom characters. It’s a useful way of looking at sitcom when you’re setting up your own group of characters. And it’s a useful model to apply when considering an existing script. Try and identify whose who in the script and see if you’ve got a missing character or if the ensemble is unbalanced.

The BOSS is the one with authority, from whatever source (job role, position, social status, family role). Note that an actual manager or leader in name may not have real authority; usually the authority figures in sitcoms are incompetent or dysfunctional in some way or exercise their authority badly. The STRIVERS are the central characters who want to improve themselves or their situation, they are striving after something. The FOOLS… are self-explanatory. But they needn’t necessarily be stupid (although they often are.) They could be intelligent but still be a fool due to being naive or their social ineptitude.

The main character in your sitcom will be a STRIVER. It is that central striver’s behaviour and attitudes that create comic problems for those around them. They are the comic PROTAGONIST. It is a common strategy to have a FOIL for who is a normal, reasonable person – or at least they are the one who is most affected by the antics of the striver. Often, they are the one the audience can relate to and we see the world through their eyes.

In summary, most successful sitcoms have this dynamic (and some unsuccessful ones lack some element of it):

BOSS – A character in position of power over the striver/ protagonist and others – it may be a role or rank or just social status or family seniority. They may have real power or it may just be vested in them by their position but they are inept in some way.

STRIVER (PROTAGONIST) – The main comic character with all their flaws and failings

FOIL – The more reasonable normal one (usually also a striver) who has to deal with the main striver. Often protagonist and foil are basically on the same side but they can be rivals. Usually the foil is the one the audience can identify with but sometimes they are less obviously likeable.

FOOL – Self-explanatory – the stupid or naive and awkward one. Often happy with their lot, they tend to be able to bounce back from the indignities heaped on them.

Some examples:

There will be other characters in these shows (who will also tend to fall into one of these slots) but here I am focussing on the central ensemble.

Fawlty Towers

BOSS – Sybil (and sometimes a guest like the American man.)

STRIVER/ PROTAGONIST – Basil

FOIL – Polly

FOOL – Manuel (and others – eg the Major)

The (UK) Office

BOSS – Neil Godwin. And Chris Finch; a social status boss who has authority over Brent

STRIVER/ PROTAGONIST – David Brent

FOIL – Tim

FOOL – Gareth (and others – eg Keith)

Blackadder 4

BOSS – General Melchett (and his boss Field Marshall Hague)

STRIVER/ PROTAGONIST – Blackadder

FOIL – Captain Darling (also a rival)

FOOL – Baldrick & George*

One working class/ one upper-middle class. One uneducated/ one educated; but both fools.

Friends

BOSS – Monica

STRIVER 1 – Ross

STRIVER 2 – Rachel

FOOL – Joey/ Phoebe

FOIL – Chandler

Having used this model with many writers and students I have found it to be a very useful framework to consider when planning your own ensemble of sitcom characters and for analysing an existing script where something is not working with your characters. Chapter 8 in my ‘Creating Comedy Narratives’ book explores creating ensembles of characters in this way and I speak with Hollywood comedy guru Steve Kaplan and TV producer and the former Controller of BBC Comedy Commissioning Lucy Lumsden for their insights into putting a group of characters together. Elsewhere, picking up on topics from this blog, chapter 1 is about basing characters on you and your nearest and dearest, and chapter 2 is all about basing characters on people you have encountered in life. Plus in later chapters I go into detail about writing and structuring scenes and sketches and ultimately build up to structuring narratives of 30 minutes and longer. And throughout I draw in stand-up and improvisation too, to make it an inspiring cross genre guide to creating comedy narratives.

For more on creating characters, writing scenes and sketches, constructing plots see Chris Head’s brilliant and unique new book “Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage and Screen”

And Chris runs online courses in sitcom/comedy drama, sketch and stand-up.

www.chrishead.com