Tag Archives: Saturday Night Live

The Key to A Good Comedy Sketch

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For years, I have wondered why some Saturday Night Live sketches (frequently after 12:30 AM in the last half hour of the show) die horrible unfunny deaths. Watching this old sketch from the 1989-1995 series, A Bit of Fry & Laurie (starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie), I realized the way good comedy writers turn a sketch around.

Too often the sketches run out of steam, or beat a dead horse. The great thing about this sketch-which for the most part has Laurie singing an absurd American jingoistic parody-was just as you thought it ran out of steam, Fry enters the sketch and punches Laurie in the throat.

Ending a sketch can be a challenge (as any writing, of course), but this struck me as a great lesson in Sketch Writing 101.

Susan E. Isaacs on Angry Conversations With God

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While researching for another interview, I was introduced to Susan E. Isaacs‘ new book, Angry Conversations With God. And I’m glad I found out about it-and even better got a chance to interview her. First some background on the book:
“Angry Conversations With God began when Susan hit hit forty and found herself loveless, jobless, and living over a garage. When a churchy friend told Susan that she needed to look at her relationship with God was it like a marriage, Susan decided to take God to marriage counseling.

Angry Conversations chronicles Susan’s spiritual history, from childhood faith to a midlife crisis, and all the bizarre church experiences in between.”

And now for some info on the author:
“Susan is an actor, writer and comedienne with credits in TV, film, stage and radio, including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, and My Name Is Earl. She is an alumnus of the Groundlings Sunday Company and has an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California.”

My thanks to Isaacs for the interview. Keep an eye out for her this fall, as she goes on a multi-city tour, promoting the book.

Tim O’Shea: Most religious memoirs do not have a tinge of irreverence to them, did you fear alienating your potential audience by going this route?

Susan E. Isaacs: People who don’t handle irreverence or extreme language shouldn’t read Jeremiah, Elijah, or St. Paul. Like in Philippians 3, Paul considers his previous accomplishments “loss” compared to knowing Christ? The original Hebrew for “loss” is a vulgar term for excrement. But we can’t print St Paul’s original intent because we’re Christians. I think there’s a difference between gratuitous irreverence, and irreverence that’s necessary to the character and the story. I took out all but two or three instances of profanity where I felt they were necessary to show the character’s desperation. Like, in one instance I spelled it out phonetically to show how violent my father’s cursing sounded to me as a child.

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