Comedians dissect jokes all the time. Comedians are beautiful structuralists. But ultimately it's an athletic endeavor. You have to be able to just hit the backhand. You can't think about all the pieces of it. You can't think about your swing. You just have to do it. Reading someone else's deconstruction of what I do, all it does is put me in my head. On nights when the show goes particularly well, I am not aware of its fluidity. A lot of nights I'm just worried that I'm not going to be as good as the script in front of me.
When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that's humorous, and we all laugh. That's generally how, just mechanically - super-distilled - comedy works.
When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.
Comedy has to do with holding and releasing tension; it's very technical. It's more technical than drama.
Sometimes if you do a multi-camera comedy, often there's rules, like, 'We've got to have three main laughs per page.'
I dare say that if most comedians today, the gifted ones, were to sit down and write, they'd learn more about their craft. But what happens is they get out there before they learn what their viewpoint is, if any.
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.
In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.
There's a common misconception with sketch comedy that you just go up there and wing it, but it's written, and there really is order.
A lot of the times I'm looking at something that I discover is part of a larger framework and not just a couple jokes. I see that it's a set, a story that I'll be telling. Sometimes I get lost in that.
For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They'll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.
