This week, I’m going to cover comedy sketches, one of the simplest and most fundamental examples of the art. Despite their simplicity, a sketch is not just a handful of gags strung together. The sketch may be a very minimal form of comedy, but, as you’ll see, it has several important characteristics.

Duration

Perhaps the most obvious one is length. Sketches are short. There’s no magic duration, but they’re usually between 1 and 5 minutes in length, depending on what happens in them. Less than sixty seconds and you probably don’t have enough time to really establish and explore its core idea. Beyond five minutes and the sketch risks outstaying its welcome.

Having said that, you can do a surprising amount in a short length of time (as my wife will attest). Consider the debating politicians sketch from the 1980s show Not the Nine O’Clock News. It’s typical of the show’s satirical and sharply observed output, and it’s barely 45 seconds in length. What a dense little nugget of comedy gold!

You can find examples at the opposite end of spectrum, ones which go on for a long time. They’re rarer in these days of TikTok teens and assorted assaults on our addled attention spans. However, back in the bad old days – when a fourth button on your remote control was a waste of space, and Pong wasn’t a video game but rather something your nicotine-stained curtains did – TV executives were more confident you weren’t going to wander off if a sketch drew itself out. Hence, people like Carol Burnett and Dick Emery in their eponymous shows of the 1970s could get away with sketches that went on for perhaps 8 minutes or more. Frankly, if your idea really needs that length of time, you’re writing less a sketch and more a comedy short (more on those in a later article).

Location

Comedy sketches almost invariably take place in a single location. Partly that’s due to cost, but also the lean nature of a sketch means there’s rarely the need or enough time to move around. Switching venues any number of times in just a couple of minutes risks throwing too much at the audience and distracting from the core funny idea.

Just pick through some of the best regarded sketches of all time (I’ve linked to some of these because I’ll refer to them again later, so have a watch to get familiar with them):

• Cook and Moore – One Leg Too Few. 1 location: Agent’s office
• SNL – Celebrity Jeopardy. 1 location: Jeopardy studio
• Goodness Gracious Me – Going for an English. 1 location: Restaurant
• Key and Peele – Substitute Teacher. 1 location: Classroom
• Victoria Wood – Acorn Antiques. 1 location: Antique shop

Of course, there are exceptions, but I’d argue that a change of location is often part of the joke. Marty Feldman’s golf player sketch jumps rapidly from place to place, but that’s the whole point of the gag. John Finnamore’s making the noise of the TARDIS sketch covers not just multiple locations but several decades because, again, it’s integral the sketch.

Situation

As well as having one location, a sketch sticks to having a single core idea, or ‘attack’. The earlier clip from Not the Nine O’Clock News has a single attack: the absurdity of professional politicians who hurl insults at their opponents and then immediately eulogise them to the heavens once one of them drops dead. There’s no shortage of reasons to haul politicians over the coals – their dishonesty, hypocrisy, greed, sexual deviancy just to name a few – but this sketch focuses on just one of their numerous idiocies. By doing so, it’s undiluted and incisive, and consequently more powerful.

Look again at the list of sketches above. They all focus on one thing. There are rarely subplots or multiple attacks competing for your attention. It helps also when the core idea is easy to grab hold of. When Dudley Moore’s monopedal character hops into Peter Cook’s office to audition for the lead role in Tarzan, or Keegan-Michael Key’s hardboiled substitute teacher starts mispronouncing the unfamiliar names, you know immediately what you’re in for.

MR. GARVEY: Jay-Quellene! Where’s Jay-Quellene at?

JACQUELINE: Uh, do you mean Jacqueline?

MR GARVEY: (agitated) OK, so that’s how it’s gonna be. Y’all wanna play, right?

Structure

When I said a sketch isn’t just a handful of gags strung together, I meant it. A sketch follows a structure, and it’s pretty much the classic one of three acts:

• Act 1: Setup and reveal – the characters and situation are established, and we get a sense of how the characters are going to deal with a problem
• Act 2: Escalation – the characters keep trying to deal with the situation and solve their problem, but something prevents them
• Act 3: Payoff – a surprise twist comes along and concludes proceedings, usually with a punchline

The surprise twist is critical and really isn’t optional in a sketch. It should also be unexpected and satisfying. Getting the balance right can make or break a sketch.

Why not watch Key and Peele’s Substitute Teacher sketch and match it to this structure?

Let’s give it a go:

• Act 1: Setup and reveal – Mr Garvey introduces himself as a no-nonsense inner-city teacher to a class of well-to-do white students. He attempts to call the register, but mispronounces an unfamiliar name and castigates the student for correcting him.
• Act 2: Escalation – He continues calling out names. Every time he does so, he is corrected and grows increasingly outraged, breaking his clipboard and smashing equipment.
• Act 3: Payoff – He calls out another name, seemingly mispronouncing Timothy as ‘Ti-moth-ey’, but in a surprise twist the name actually belongs to the sole black student, who answers ‘Present.’ A grateful Garvey delivers the punchline: ‘Thank you.’

Conflict

Every sketch has conflict of some kind. The Substitute Teacher sketch features it in a rather literal sense with Mr. Garvey’s threats, but conflict doesn’t necessarily mean shouting or fisticuffs. It means more generally that a character wants something but can’t get it, usually because of their comic flaw (as in the case of Mr. Garvey) or because they’re a sane character in an insane situation, like Peter Cook’s casting agent faced with a wannabe action star despite being ‘deficient in the leg department to the tune of one.’

Gags

And, sticking with Cook and Moore for a moment, there’s also something a sketch needs: a steady stream of gags. It doesn’t just depend on the reveal or the punchline to get laughs. A good sketch rarely lets a few seconds pass without trying to elicit a titter. That might sound obvious, but it means having to insert a gag into almost every line of dialogue, and that’s not easy.

When we learn a one-legged Moore wants to audition for the role of Tarzan in the One Leg Too Few sketch, there’s a big laugh. Good. But it doesn’t stop there. It explores the idea and mines it for as many laughs as it can, in this case by having Cook’s casting agent being comically understated and creatively euphemistic.

COOK: Mr Spiggott, I couldn’t help noticing that you are a one-legged person.

MOORE: You noticed that?

COOK: I noticed that, Mr Spiggott. When you have been in the business as long as I have, you come to notice these little things almost instinctively.

[…]

COOK: Your right leg, I like. I like your right leg. It’s a lovely leg for the role. I’ve got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is – neither have you.

Types of Sketches

You could write a sketch about practically anything, so it’s not easy coming up with classifications covering all sketches. However, a few general categories cover most.

Everyday Situations Made Absurd

These sketches feature normal people who find themselves in an absurd situation. The absurdity of things is usually the impediment to them getting what they want. One Leg Too Few is an example of this.

Insane Character in a Sane Setting

Conversely a sketch could drop an absurd character into an everyday situation. The impediment to the character getting what they want is usually the character themselves, as their comic flaw thwarts their efforts. Mr. Garvey is an example of this.

Parodies

These sketches find a real-life target – like a film or a celebrity – and do their utmost to look and sound exactly like them for comic effect. Saturday Night Live has done plenty of these in its time, it’s long-running Celebrity Jeopardy being a prime example. In the UK, French & Saunders pretty much ruled the roost when it came to film parodies. Their send-up of Silence of the Lambs is a classic.

Political/Satirical

Like parodies, these sketches deal with a real-life target in a funny way. Unlike parodies, they often do so to question the establishment or the status quo. They also don’t have to be as accurate in their imitations. In fact, exaggeration tends to make them funnier. Compare Jennifer Saunders’s spot-on imitation of Jodie Foster to the kinds of impressions that Spitting Image used to throw up.

What’s Not a Sketch?

Well, technically almost everything in the universe is not a comedy sketch. Rather than cover all of that, I’ll round off by pointing out a couple of comedy forms that are very closely related.

A skit is a sort of mini-sketch. It’s very short, based largely around a single joke, and its situation is not explored in any real depth. For example, Rowan Atkinson’s man caught on camera while going down the street:

On a similar note, a vox pop features a character in an interview situation, the humour coming from their comical behaviour. Smack the Pony had a hilarious running sketch of dating agency videos.

Next…

Over the next few articles, I’ll expand on the idea of a sketch with some stories and analysis.