UCB Sketch Class and an Attempt to Get Better at Posting Here More Often

I'm currently taking the introductory sketch comedy writing class at Upright Citizens Brigade, which I signed up for half on a whim and half because I had been thinking about it for a while, and figured I might as well go for it.

My circle of friends growing up was, if I may say so, a really funny group of people. Now granted, everyone thinks their friends are hilarious, and I'm well aware of the fact that I could simply be seeing this through my own limited perspective. At the end of High School and throughout the summers between college years, my friends and I put together a bunch of movies in what we called "Genetically Delicious Films," our mock-production company. These movies were done on the absolute cheap. Oftentimes, when I mention these to people, they treat it as if these films were some kind of indie production with actual crews, and they will ask me if I've ever submitted the films to any festivals. I don't think I'm able to translate to people who react this way just how low our production quality was.

Yet I had a hell of a time making these things, and even though they were pretty much made to only be fully enjoyed by the people who were in them, I look back at them with a lot of nostalgia.

The thing is, my own writing is rarely comedic. I don't know if it's just that I'm an overly-serious person or that I've been burned too many times by people reacting more with a "huh?" than laughter to what I think is funny.

So a comedy class seemed like a good challenge to myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm still doing my Dispatches from Otherworld, still working (slowly, very slowly) on my novel set in the same universe, but I'm trying to push myself just a hair outside my comfort zone.

With two classes through, we've learned the absolute basics of the UCB sketch philosophy. The basic idea is that you have a premise - such as "a man finds out his closest family and loved ones have been lying to him his whole life," and then find a "game" to it, wherein you find a unique way for that premise to be explored. The example we got, in "The Truth" by Charlie Sanders, is that the lies he's been told go from fairly believable to utterly ridiculous, such that by the end, we realize that he is just incredibly gullible.

Now, I've probably butchered what the "game" is there, but hey, I'm still in the 101 class.

My first sketch written for the class involved a space alien arriving on Earth. The premise was that the alien's culture caused many difficulties in forming a friendly rapport with the humans, but the game of it was that that culture was one of acting like a mooching, obnoxiously inconsiderate friend. The alien moves into the human's apartment without asking, invites a bunch of other aliens over to get stoned there, steals and wrecks the human's car, and finally reveals that he is sleeping with the human's mother - all in the name of establishing a friendly relationship between their two species. The problem I ran into (that was pointed out in class) is that the initial beat, in which the alien throws a rock at one of the humans' foreheads by way of greeting him, and the last beat, where the alien benevolently removes the aforementioned human's brain as a kind of medical treatment, don't really fit the game.

Sure, this violence against the human is not what we would consider friendly, but it doesn't fit the overall game.

Still, I got some laughs, which were a little few and far between in the room (something about writers not wanting to validate each others' work? I don't know.)