Chaos Attraction

Sketch 101 Week 8: Any Time You Can Pee During A Sketch....

2016-10-24, 10:20 p.m.

Previous week here.

So we read new sketches and acted out the rewritten old ones...which was not how I expected that to go when I was printing scripts out. Oops. Oh well.

My new one for the week was “Hallmark Hanukkah,” four pages of a sped up Hallmark movie if Hallmark ever did Hanukkah. So I have the heroine get fired on Hanukkah, have her boyfriend walk out on her and then her mother shows up, followed by “Hanukkah Harry the Armadillo” who wants to make people think he’s real. I was delighted by it. Chris was a little “huh, this seems kinda fast, you go from her losing everything to this Hanukkah Harry” thing, but I doubt he’s seen those movies. But yeah, it doesn’t stay in a particular pattern. And I probably shouldn’t use the Friends armadillo reference and should create my own mascot. But it was “really good” and “super fun” and people had a great time reading it aloud, especially the chick playing the Jewish mother.

Other ones:
“Fake It Till You Make It” was being able to spray on a spray on yourself so that you could disguise your emotions. I LOVE THIS IDEA AND WISH I COULD BUY IT. We all did. Though Chris said it could be heightened a bit and get weirder faster.

Athletes & Lives That Matter: taking Black Lives Matter and the pledge a bit too far when everyone has different kinds of protests. And also pig socks to protest the police. “Oh, I can make up stuff,” she said. Crazy town!

DIY With Bikers: Bikers have a craft show. OF COURSE I LOVED THIS. Apparently could have used a bit more biker and less craft...hah.

Then we did stage reads. I ended up rewriting “Barbie for Boys” in which the boys playact with six different Barbies now and have a Republican one support the Sniper Barbie and go look for a prostitute, the prostitute grabs the gun and shoots her pimp...fun times. But yes, it could just be Barbie for Adults really...

Alien Waiting Room, round 2, was fun because I got to play one of the aliens and she was having us do bad jokes and a horrible laugh. We had a great time doing that.

We tried doing the Automate It Andy one, but it’s kind of hard to act out automation...that said, I was playing the guy who got told a robot was going to help him pee, so that was a hoot/disturbing. One quote from class: “Any time you can pee during a sketch, it’s amazing.” We also did Raging Rudolph again,with less flames and more teen angst.

Last minute notes:
* Parody--include original elements and twist them, like if we’d called Raging Rudolph “Rebel Without A Claus.”
* Less is more in staging.
We watched a video called “Sump’n Claus,” in which a pimp-ish Santa makes sure everyone gets money.
* You can have a less focused pattern if you have a song in it.

I asked about the future of sketch writing--they’ve pushed Sketch 201 back another two months and now they still won’t let anyone else join until they hold the class. (I gotta say, that’s a little unfair. But they probably have shit tons of people already.) However, he said we could try pitching our own Saturday at 10:30 show if we wanted to try creating a student showcase. He doesn’t have the time to put one together, but if we got together to create one he could do the mentoring. So we wrote down our e-mail addresses...and we’ll see if anything happens.

Truth be told, I suspect this won’t happen or people won’t get to it, because 90% of the time stuff like this never gets off the ground somehow. Also because as usual, I’m the only one refusing to do Facebook and people only ever want to do Facebook. (In the highly unlikely event I ever made a team, I don’t know what the hell I’d do since it seems like they all have required groups to join on Facebook. GAAAAAAAAAH I DON’T WANT TO USE IT TOO MUCH POTENTIAL FOR EVIL these days.) So I suspect they’ll all just chat on Facebook and I’ll be left out, but...that’s the choice I make to not engage with the world like a person who refuses to get a cell phone, I suppose.

I’d like to do it, but I learned the hard way last year that I completely lost my mojo to travel in the cold, dark, and wet once the time change hit and I stopped going to the Comedy Spot entirely. This year I’m just planning for/assuming I won’t go again until the next time change, and I’m not signing up for the spiffy new night classes starting in November (well, that and NaNo, I shouldn’t be doing that much stuff) because I’ll freak at driving in pouring dark rain yet again. Waaaah, but there it is.

Class was fun, though. Hopefully I’ll jump into musical improv, improv 401 and sketch 201 come March.


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