They had me going until the end.

I think so far the most challenging aspect of writing a sketch has been giving it an ending. With a sketch, your main objective is to tell a joke, but you're not doing it in a traditional way. With a simple joke, you just tell it and the ending is the punchline, everyone laughs and you move on. Even with stand up you basically just go from subject to subject until you're done and 90% of comics will just say "That's my time" and give a wave before walking away from the stage. In a sketch you really can't do that. The only way to walk away would be to tell the joke, and just cut to the next thing. Some people can get away with that, like Robot Chicken on Adult Swim. Those sketches tend to work so well like that because it's just a quick 5-30 second clip of a robot having sex with a washing machine. Live action performances take more than that usually.


Anthony can really end a sketch well. He gives a twist at the end, or a final joke or at least some form of closure where you can clearly see that you've reached the end. I haven't found out how to do that yet. Now most of my sketches just kind of abruptly end once I've said everything that I can say on the subject. I first noticed this while trying to find some way of ending a sketch I was working on called "Breakdance Boss" which was basically about this company that makes all of it's major decisions based on the ability of workers to breakdance. One of the problems with it, besides not having anyone who can dance, was that there was no real ending for it. The best I could come up with was that after a training montage one of the employees dances so well, he gives off a blinding golden light and that cuts to everyone drinking scotch and smoking cigars and counting money.

This came up again after seeing how Sean had chosen to end one of the dramatic readings of pop songs. I had never really considered it ending any other way than it just cutting to whatever came next. I really can't be doing that though, just forgetting the ending once the joke has been told. It's something that is going to make my sketch creation process more complicated as I not only have to ask myself if this is something we can film with our current resources, but is this something that I can write and ending for?

So now I have to approach each sketch and ask myself:
1) Is this actually funny? Is it just a dumb gag, or is it an actually good joke?
2) Is there a solid ending here somewhere? Can I give a final joke at the end, or does it just need to end wherever I can find a place to end it?
3) Can we actually film this? Are the props, location and technical elements things we can do on a budget of "whatever you're willing to shell out for it"?
4) Has this been done before? Did I make this up, or did I actually see this on Kids in the Hall 10 years ago and forget about it until now?

And there's probably more that I'm just not thinking about right now.

It can be quite the complicated process, to say the least. It's been fun so far though, so there's that. Hopefully we can start getting these out there and on youtube, which will only excite us all more to do as much as we can for the show.