About a year ago I took a break from my sporadic upkeep of this website… a hiatus… from my hiatus.
I pivoted most of my extra time into a year’s worth of ‘extra-curricular’ school at the Second City Training Center. I wanted to put my other projects on hold to spend some time learning how to write something different. The goal with most of Second City’s course offerings is to spend a year taking classes that culminate in a final showcase. In this case, our class would write and produce a stage variety show, casting and directing other actors. One year, six classes, & one pandemic later, that didn’t quite come to fruition. What we ended up with was four 10-15 minute shows released over the course of four weeks.
I originally intended to use this space as a vehicle to share the knowledge I gained during a year of classes. But ultimately, that’s probably not a cool thing to do as someone gets paid to design and teach that curriculum and I’m not trying to take money out of their pockets. So instead of talking about what I learned in class, I’ve decided to talk about some things I learned about producing amateur work during a pandemic.
1) Writing sketches for a camera is wildly different than writing for the stage.
Yeah… no doi Brian. Hope you didn’t empty your bank account for this one.
Maybe it’s an obvious statement, but there are a lot of small things you have to account for when you’re writing a sketch script for stage. It’s way more efficient to write for screen; when you see two people sitting in a coffee shop, you don’t have to write unnatural dialogue about being in a coffee shop like you would sitting on an empty stage. But if you want to write a sketch about a girl with a samurai sword… you have to have a samurai sword. It’s like we learned how to write all year in a square box and then the pandemic hit and we were suddenly writing in a rectangle box. All the lines were still there but the margins for cutting corners are in different places… yeah, maybe that was a pretty obvious thing to say.
2) COVID-19 isn’t funny.
Get the stick out of your ass Brian. Anything is funny if you make the right joke.
It’s not that there aren’t elements of it that aren’t funny. I have seen my peers write plenty of funny sketches involving distancing, or being understood in your mask, etc. But by and large… it’s not a funny topic. We’re dealing with it 24/7, whether it’s hearing about spiking cases, the political angle, the lockdown angle, the economic angle. It’s ALWAYS there, and when we get past all these things and it’s time to make jokes… I just want to make jokes about something that doesn’t exhaust me. On the surface it seems like easy pickings comedy is better when we all have a shared experience, right? But Coronavirus is fool’s gold for that, because we aren’t sharing this experience. Some of us know people who have died. Some of us have to go to work every day. Some of us don’t think it’s real. Some of us are battling depression and anxiety from prolonged isolation. There’s no catharsis in jokes about it because we’re all in need of a different type of catharsis… or maybe I just haven’t seen a great joke yet. I hope you can find it! Because I can’t.
3) Shorter is Better
You’re just saying that because you’re too lazy to write any of your plays Brian!
I don’t know about you, but my attention span is shot. I’ve written on this site about how much I love to read and I’ve finished maybe 2-3 books all year. I balk at watching a movie lately, but I’ll watch 2 hours of music videos. Shorter is better. In lockdown, I’ve read a lot of plays, comic books, short stories, YouTube videos, TikTok videos, trashy TV. I’m not looking for epics right now, I’m looking for vignettes. There’s something way more digestible about consuming smaller bites… or I’m just mixing my metaphors because I’m too lazy to find the right metaphor.
4) There’s never been a better time to make stuff.
Your next post will be in a year telling us how you didn’t make anything.
There’s so much time to make stuff right now. Our class pivoted from a stage show to a filmed show in just 8 weeks. It’s just about problem solving. There are a million ways to tell an effective story – we’ve gotten so used to consuming media in only a few ways/styles that we’ve forgotten about old fun ways to do it (the RADIO!) or we haven’t thought of new fun ways (I’ll tell you when I think of it). I have a classmate that very wisely reminded us all one day that the result of the Black Death was the Renaissance. So get to work and share everything! If you’re like me, and you have a little voice in your head that second guesses every single thing you do or say. Let’s prove it wrong.
I look forward to sharing my work here with you. I guess you could say I’m back on Extended Hiatus.
This is one week of my class’s four-week sketch show. I wrote and produced two of the segments in this one: “Mystical Mr. Cal” & “Ethics of a Billionaire”. Special thanks to my wife for being my quarantine pal and appearing in both sketches. If you like these, watch some of the related videos to see more of my classmates’ work.
The Extended Hiatus 