Beyond the Skin Deep Sketch / 1

Baldwin / BEYOND THE SKIN DEEP SKETCH / 1 Chapter One Conflict A mother and her son embrace. A mother and her estranged son embrace. A mother and her son, newly escaped from prison, embrace. A police captain waits for her signal outside. # Which story would you rather listen to? # Conflict is the secret recipe to captivating stories. Conflict has a sister named suspense. Together, they make every party amazing. As a writer, these two mean girls should be your best friends. In sketch comedy, if your scene doesn’t feature conflict, the audience will invent some conflict for you, then get disappointed when their conflict doesn’t blossom into anything. Baldwin / BEYOND THE SKIN DEEP SKETCH / 2 As a writer, conflict is one of your greatest tools, and it should be used purposefully to make audiences feel tension, and laughter is human’s natural line of defense to ease tension. You want to make your audience laugh. You can see where I’m going here. You can add conflict into your scene like salt to season characters, settings, plot, or structure. In this chapter, I’ll share a few things you should be thinking about when you’re writing or revising a sketch to make sure your jokes have the most fertile soil in which to grow. # Conflict the Basics: Drive and Frustration, Desire and Obstacle # Every sketch needs some type of drive, and in most cases it is an unrealized desire by one or more characters. An aimless character is almost as frustrating as a high school senior. Almost. The most common type of conflict comes from a character encountering obstacles that block his or her desires. A simple example: I would like to get an authentic Philly Cheesesteak. One obstacle may be that there are no places to buy an authentic Philly Cheesesteak where I live. My desire is frustrated by obstacle. Conflict, in this sense, describes the relationship between the desire and obstacle. That’s a rule of thumb worth repeating: conflict describes the relationship between desire and obstacle. If your scene has a character that truly wants something, and struggles through obstacles to get it, you have the basics of a scene worth watching. It seems very simple, but I can’t tell you Baldwin / BEYOND THE SKIN DEEP SKETCH / 3 how many writers forget it. I sit down with students at times and ask, “what does this character want?” You’d be surprised how often I can’t get a straight answer. Now, sometimes, a character wants a lot of things, and so the student isn’t sure with which to reply. It’s fine for a character to want several things, but you should be able to group them and give them a singular name. My character wants respect. My character wants vengeance. My character wants validation. If you can’t narrow it down to a single item, you may need to choose which things is most important to your character. # Manipulating Tension with Conflict # As a humorist, you get to play with the amount of conflict you choose to allow in your scene the same way chefs can decide how much seasoning to put on a chicken breast. It’s personal, it’s unique, but there are still wrong choices. A friend and I once wanted to experiment with this idea of conflict and tension. We wondered if we could write a sketch in which we did not allow the audience a chance to let off the tension created through conflict. So, we wrote a sketch in which we cast the audience in a role. It was a courtroom sketch, and it began with the judge instructing the audience that he tolerated no tomfollery and if anyone laughed they would be escorted from the room. We had two baliffs stand in the aisles looking tough. Then, we played at a silly criminal trial about the boy who stole the cookie from the cookie jar. Baldwin / BEYOND THE SKIN DEEP SKETCH / 4 Inevitably, our cast mates had to escort people out of the room. In fact, it was impossible to escort all the laughers out of the room. It was just too much tension. The tension came from several different types of conflict. The in-scene conflict came from a prosecutor trying to prove a boy stole a cookie from the cookie jar even though a defense attorney thwarted his attempts. Out of scene conflict came from a judge wanting quiet in the theater even though he was an actor in a comedy show. The sketch was a success, even if all the extra work of kicking people out made it go on too long. As baliffs escorted audience members from their seats, a third conflict arose. Audience members did not want to be embarrassed by the baliffs even though they couldn’t hold their laughter. That tension made them laugh. So the cycle continued. There’s No Need to Wait Around: Early Action Early Conflict Early Tension # One of my favorite types of feedback to give students is cruel and vicious but hopefully helpful. When I get a script, sometimes I’ll take a red pen and draw a line down the page through the dialogue all the way to the line that actually starts the scene. Once, I cut out two pages from a six page script this way. Audiences are more intelligent than many writers believe. There are lots of ways to hand out exposition that don’t require lines of dialogue. If you look at your script and there are lines like “how are you doing?” or “hey man, what’s up?” you may benefit from my favorite type of feedback. Baldwin / BEYOND THE SKIN DEEP SKETCH / 5 Of course, I’m referring to a latin phrase called in media res which roughly means in the middle of the action. Great scenes start in the middle of the action. In Sol Stein’s fabulous book On Writing, he goes over the different forms of narration that authors have in a book. One is immediate action. Another form is action that happens offstage. Immediate action is made up of things like dialogue and sequences that put the character doing things in the mind’s eye here and now. Offstage action happens when the author gets the reader up to speed, so to speak. Usually it reads like a “last time on TV Show” type of summary. For our purposes in writing for the stage, you can adapt this idea to view whether you have immediate action or let’s call it “what should be offstage action,” and by that I mean it should never be on the stage. Andrew Stanton, producer and writer for Pixar, once described this as the principle of 1 + 1. Don’t give an audience two. Give them two separate pieces and let them piece it together. Audiences love to feel like they are solving a puzzle. It gets their minds engaged and invested in the scene. Let’s look at an example. Here is one possible opening to a scene. Man: Hey, babe. (Kisses wife) Woman: Oh hi, how was your day? Man: Fine. Have you had dinner. Woman: Oh no. Man: Oh. Well, do you want to go out? Woman: Sure. Is there somewhere you wanna go? Baldwin / BEYOND THE SKIN DEEP SKETCH / 6 Man: I don’t care. Wherever. McDonald’s? Arby’s? Subway? Woman: I wanna go somewhere a little fancier. Man: What’s the occassion? Woman: …it’s my birthday. # This mini scene has in it. In fact, there’s loads of it, but you don’t know that until the end. We can cut fifty percent if not more. # Man: Hey, babe. Have you had dinner? Woman: I was thinking we could go out. Man: What’s occassion? Woman: I don’t know, Tom. What is the occassion? # This exchange, only four lines, delivers roughly the same amount of information. But, I want to push you to think even harder about in media res. See how this scene revolves around another scene that isn’t happening on stage? They’re talking about the dinner they’re going to have later. To increase the conflict and the interest, what can we do? We can push the whole scene to the action. # Scene: Man and Woman sit in a booth at McDonald’s. Man, dressed in jeans and a t shirt, chews vacantly on a Big Mac. Woman, dressed too nicely for a fast food restaurant, has a downcast, upset look on her face. She just stares at her husband. Woman’s phone buzzes. She silences it. Baldwin / BEYOND THE SKIN DEEP SKETCH / 7 Man: I always feel so fancy when I order something not on the dollar menu. Woman: (flatly) Yeah. Man: (as if seeing her for the first time that day) You look really nice. Woman’s phone buzzes again. She silences it. Man: You’re popular today. Phone’s been buzzing off the hook. Woman: I guess I must be special today. Man: I guess so. Woman’s phone buzzes again. She silences it for a third time. Man: Maybe you should pick it up. What if there’s some kind of problem? Woman: There’s a problem, all right. # We will leave poor Man in the lurch here. Hopefully, he figures it out soon. But more importantlty, hopefully you can see what that sense of immediacy does to the conflict and the interest in the scene. The audience may not know the specifics, but from the clue they pick on the fact that Man has missed the boat on something.

Load more