Sketch comedy

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(Redirected from
Sketch (comedy)
)
"Sketch show" redirects here. For the English TV programme, see The Sketch Show. For the Japanese band, see Sketch Show (band).
A white man holds the neck of another grimacing white man while two white women talk.
The actors of Nightmare on Overwhelmed Street performing in 2018.

Sketch comedy comprises a series of short, amusing

scenes or vignettes, called "sketches", commonly between one and ten minutes long, performed by a group of comic actors or comedians. The form developed and became popular in vaudeville, and is used widely in variety shows, comedy talk shows, and some sitcoms and children's television series. The sketches may be improvised live by the performers, developed through improvisation before public performance, or scripted and rehearsed in advance like a play. Sketch comedians routinely differentiate their work from a "skit", maintaining that a skit is a (single) dramatized joke (or "bit")[1] while a sketch is a comedic exploration of a concept, character, or situation.[2]
Sketch comedy is a genre within American television that includes a multitude of schemes and identities.

History

Sketch comedy has its origins in vaudeville and music hall, where many brief humorous acts were strung together to form a larger programme.

In

A Bit of Fry and Laurie
.

An early, perhaps the first, televised example of a sketch comedy show is Texaco Star Theater aka The Milton Berle Show 1948–1967, hosted by Milton Berle.[3] In Mexico, the series Los Supergenios de la Mesa Cuadrada, created by Mexican comedian Roberto Gómez Bolaños under the stage name Chespirito, was broadcast between 1968 and 1973, creating such famous characters as El Chavo del Ocho and El Chapulín Colorado.

While separate sketches historically have tended to be unrelated, more recent groups have introduced overarching themes that connect the sketches within a particular show with recurring characters that return for more than one appearance. Examples of recurring characters include

Harry Enfield and Chums. Recurring characters from Saturday Night Live have notably been featured in a number of spinoff films, including The Blues Brothers (1980), Wayne's World (1992) and Superstar
(1999).

The idea of running characters was taken a step further with shows like

Little Britain
, sketches focused on a cast of recurring characters.

In

improvisational comedy scene that flourished during the 1970s, largely growing out of The Second City in Chicago and Toronto, which was built upon the success in Minneapolis of The Brave New Workshop and Dudley Riggs
.

Notable contemporary American stage sketch comedy groups include The Second City, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and The Groundlings. In South Bend, Indiana, area high school students produced a sketch comedy series called Beyond Our Control that aired on the local NBC affiliate WNDU-TV from 1967 to 1986. Warner Bros. Animation made two sketch comedy shows, Mad and Right Now Kapow.

Australian television of the '80s and '90s featured several successful sketch comedy shows, notably

Col'n Carpenter, Kylie Mole and Con the Fruiterer
.

Films

An early British example is the influential The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959). Sketch films made during the 1970s and 1980s include

If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind and the sequel Can I Do It... 'Til I Need Glasses?, The Groove Tube, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), The Kentucky Fried Movie and its sequel Amazon Women on the Moon, and Monty Python's And Now for Something Completely Different and The Meaning of Life
.

More recent sketch films include

InAPPropriate Comedy, Movie 43 and Livrés chez vous sans contact
.

Festivals

Many of the sketch comedy

Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Further information: Edinburgh Comedy Awards

Since 1999, the growing sketch comedy scene has precipitated the development of sketch comedy festivals in cities all around North America. Noted festivals include:

See also

References

  1. ^ Skit, Merriam-Webster online. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. ^ Sketch, definition 3b, Merriam-Webster online. Retrieved 5/4/2019
  3. ISBN 0345397363
    .

Further reading
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