A Quote by Fred Willard
I have friends who will say, "Oh you gotta come and see our show." And the first thing I say is, "Is it sketch or improv?" I'll go in a minute to see a sketch show. I love sketch; it's my favorite form. But if it's all improv, they're either very good and it's annoying how good they are and it makes you feel bad, or they're not too good then you're sweating for them. And you don't want to sweat for them, see actors repeating each other's lines.
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I love sketch; it's my favorite form. But if it's all improv, they're either very good, and it's annoying how good they are, and it makes you feel bad, or they're not too good; then you're sweating for them.
I think that if you just kind of try to throw together a sketch show, but you don't have any real vision for what you want to do with the sketch, I don't think your chances are very good. You know, "Let's just have a sketch show!" You have to do something different with it; you have to reinvent that form every so often.
With improv or a full length play - you know how you go to a theater, and after 10 minutes you say, 'Oh, I don't like this thing,' but you don't want to get up and leave? At a sketch show, it's always something new every few minutes.
And that's the thing about our show: what are they going to do put on the poster? I don't know. It's always easier when you have someone like Cedric the Entertainer where you can go, "You know this guy. You love this guy. Watch his sketch show." And then people tune in and go, "I though I knew that guy. I don't love that guy in a sketch show."
I'll go in a minute to see a sketch show.
Sketch comes from everyday life. You can see someone on the street, and it can turn into a five-minute sketch.
If you want good sketches, go pick up Sid Caesar. The best of Your Show of Shows. That's the greatest sketch comedy you'll ever see on television.
When somebody would come in with a sketch that was not so good, you figured out in a room how to make that sketch work.
Standups have all the talk shows, but you never see a sketch group on a talk show. Even on so-called variety shows, if you do see a sketch group or character, it's written specifically for that variety show and usually written around the host of the show or a celebrity.
A sketch should be about two to three minutes, which is basically what most songs are. They're usually done by groups. Good examples of each build and have different parts and twists in them. I guess sketch would be the comedy version of music.
But the classic Tenacious D songwriting is Jack or myself will have an idea - I might have a riff - and we'll improv. And once Jack's feeling it, we turn on the tape recorder and start jamming, improv on that riff, improv on those lyrics, and then go back and see if there's anything good in there.
We started off in improv and sketch comedy, and with improv the most important thing is to listen and make sure you're not stepping over someone, so we've been trained for such a long time doing that.
The thing I love about sketch is sometimes it leads you as opposed to you leading it. So, I don't go out there [thinking], "Oh, I want to make this as silly as possible." In fact, sometimes I get the most enjoyment out of a sketch that plays very real - and it's so real that it's just funny.
Nobody wants to see sketch comedy that's the same sketch they've seen time and time again, or that's just a rehash of that thing.
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
For myself, the way that I learned comedy was doing it live for four years, and only after doing sketch for four years did I feel confident enough to be like, 'Okay, I feel good about starting to put stuff on the Internet where it lives forever.' As opposed to one time at a college sketch show where it bombs and we never speak of it again.
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