Okay, I’m finally catching up on some more commentary entries for Sketchwar.
This time around, we had three sketches based on “the heist”[1] — one from Mr. Porter, one from Mr. Robertson, and one from me.
Of the three, Mr. Porter definitely wins for the sight gag of the week. I would have pared down the ~minute of offscreen dialog over that static shot of the Hudson River, but afterwards, when we see our would-be criminals wearing goose costumes, it’s a hell of a payoff.
I myself didn’t care for the TV-intro montage midway. This sketch seems like it wants to be simple and to the point: establish our criminals, establish that they’re going to fake a birdstrike crash, fade to black.
On to Mr. Robertson’s sketch.
I don’t usually harp on technicalities, but the prose in this one made me a little twitchy. A few quick guidelines:
1. Only put a character name in ALL CAPS when that character first appears.
2. Avoid any form of “to be”.
3. Avoid adverbs.
4. Avoid big blocks of text. Some writers do “one block’o’text per shot”, others do “one block’o’text per action”. If you do that and still wind up with lengthy paragraphs, you’re being too long-winded and/or including too much detail.
Okay, on to the sketch proper. It’s a great concept, the narcisstic French cat burglars who are kept in business by rich men running insurance scams. I’d cut a bunch out of this one, though. I’d cut maybe half of the lines up to the Donna Summer music. Leave enough for the audience to see the arc of the scene, but kill a lot of the repetition.
I love the guard’s appearance, and the sharply different voice he brings to the scene (though you might rename “Gerard” to something that doesn’t look so much like “Guard”). I love the idea that it’s all an insurance scam. I’d find some way to pare down the guard’s “You pricks tripped a silent alarm…” speech, though — that is a giganamous chunk of exposition, and that’s a long time for a sketch to not be funny.
Similarly, I’d cut the guard’s “Nope” and Gerard’s “You won’t burst in again…?” (It’s a repetition.)
Lastly, I like Gerard’s “Uh, could you leave the lights on…?” line. I’d say, do that line, have the euro-boys resume dancing, and fade to black off of that. The button of a scene is where you want to be incredibly concise instead of trailing off.
Again: great idea, but it just needs to move a lot faster.
On to mine — I’m shocked and flattered that people liked my contribution. I had a morning flight to Florida on that Friday, which meant that (1) I had to finish the sketch a day early and (2) I had very little time to write, what with the trip preparations. So I sat down and worked through the simplest sketch-concept possibilities: they’re heisting something unusual; they’re heisting something in an unusual way; there are unusual people doing the heisting.
Aha! That last one looked doable. So I started listing the least likely heist-team people I could think of. Then I came up with the “all the criminals are in banking” punchline. Great, I thought. I’ll just write out a bunch of introductions, write the punchline, and then resume packing for my trip. Much as I’d like to think it was my razor-sharp comic instincts that made me limit the sketch to one joke with maximum impact, it’s more like “I didn’t have enough time to make it less funny.”
Honestly? I myself don’t find the punch line that funny. I’m more amused by the team members. (I’m sure I’m ripping off the inaupsicious students in “The Tick vs. Education” to some extent. More people should steal from that show.) In fact, this is one of the only sketches I’ve written where I’m more intrigued by what would happen after the sketch *ends* than I am by the sketch itself. (How shall the Boggler prove his worth when they try to steal the diamond?)
But like I said, people seem to dig this one, so I’m proud of my little “blackout sketch” (in the wrapup, I learned a new phrase), and I’m glad to have provided some amusement.
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[1] I remember suggesting this topic after seeing rather extensive coverage of Leverage over on Mr. Porter’s TV site.