To clear matters up for your well-meaning parents, here are a couple of things that sketch comedy isn’t: It’s not standup, which involves only one person telling jokes presentationally before an audience. It’s also not improv, in which a group makes up comedic scenes and characters on the spot. And it’s not “skits,” a word people shouldn’t use.
Sketch comedy is the perfect outlet for spreading your wings as a comedian while marrying the art form with the conventions of theater and/or film. Let’s strap on our wigs, write out our game moves, and take a deeper look. (Full disclosure: The author of this piece is a member of a UCB sketch comedy team.)
This is the art of writing and performing self-contained comedic scenes. Think of a sketch as a piece of micro–theater or film that’s expressly interested in generating laughs by exploring a single concept for roughly one to 10 minutes.
Sketch has its roots in vaudeville, music hall, and burlesque, in which comedy legends like the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin performed routines in front of rowdy crowds. Sketch evolved with the rise of radio and television, as influential programs like Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” brought vaudevillian pleasures to a wider audience.
From the ’60s through the ’90s, sketch-comedy juggernauts like Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Carol Burnett, and the casts of “SCTV” and “Saturday Night Live” became staples. 21st century experimentation from the likes of Adult Swim, Comedy Central, the Lonely Island, and Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor)—as well as countless creators on platforms like Vine, TikTok, and YouTube—have brought an edginess to the genre.
Training centers and troupes like Second City, the Groundlings, and the Upright Citizens Brigade continue to keep sketch comedy alive by cultivating new talent, teaching classes, and putting on live shows.
Comedic Timing 101: How to Tell Jokes With Ease Examples of sketch comedy
Abbott and Costello: Who’s on First? (1945)
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello developed this iconic routine on the vaudeville and burlesque circuits before committing it to film in Jean Yarbrough’s “The Naughty Nineties.” It’s a simple enough idea—what if baseball players used common phrases as names?—heightened to its logical extreme.
“Monty Python’s Flying Circus”: Silly Voices at the Police Station (1970)
A great mantra for developing sketches is: If this is true, what else is true? This English group’s influential sketch show takes this principle beyond all reason by raising the question: If one policeman needs to be spoken to in a silly way, don’t all of them?
“Saturday Night Live”: Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood: Puppet Show (1981)
Sketch comedy can be a strong tool to satirize politics, race relations, socioeconomics, and everything in between. “SNL” has been proving it since the show debuted in 1975. In the recurring “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood” sketch, Eddie Murphy tackles these topics through the lens of children’s TV.
“The Kids in the Hall”: “Citizen Kane” (1989)
Often, the most unusual character in a sketch is the one who generates new comedic beats. But in this sketch from celebrated Canadian troupe Kids in the Hall, the voice of reason—a guy (Dave Foley) who’s certain he’s not talking about the film “Citizen Kane”—moves the story forward.
“Mr. Show With Bob and David”: The Audition Sketch (1998)
Sketch can be a great outlet for exploring an idea that just won’t fit into a longer-form piece. In this classic from Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’ HBO series, a patently absurd concept—an actor performing an audition piece as a character asking about an audition piece—gets folded in on itself as many times as possible over the course of four minutes.
“That Mitchell and Webb Look”: Are We the Baddies? (2006)
This satirical sketch from British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb is so iconic that it’s become a meme. In it, two Nazi soldiers slowly, dimly answer the titular question that everyone else in the world already knows the answer to.
“Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”: Sleepwatching Chair (2010)
With their late-night Adult Swim series, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim abstracted the art of sketch into a surreal, nightmarish playground of avant-garde editing effects and nontraditional performances. “Sleepwatching Chair” feels like what would happen if David Lynch and satirist Chris Morris took over a public access channel for a week.
“Key & Peele”: Flicker (2012)
Sometimes, all a sketch needs is one stupid note played at the highest register possible. In this scene from their Comedy Central show, Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele turn a trivial prank into a piece of operatic bombast.
Aunty Donna: Family Feud (2017)
It can be incredibly educational for aspiring writers and performers to watch sketches specifically designed to be performed onstage. In this breakneck piece of silliness, performed live at the Enmore Theatre, Aussie comedy troupe Aunty Donna calls out the conventions of theater itself.
“A Black Lady Sketch Show”: Courtroom Kiki (2019)
Sketches can be ideal for broadcasting comedians’ observations about the world, exaggerating interesting aspects of human behavior. On Robin Thede’s HBO series, an all-star cast performs a court hearing that highlights how rare it is in our society to see a roomful of professional Black women. Issa Rae adds a hilarious wrinkle as the voice of reason.
“I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson”: Instagram (2019)
Robinson and Zach Kanin’s Netflix series is a contemporary classic that often plays with a great generator for sketch ideas: rendering relatable human behavior unrecognizable by taking it to a level of overwhelming intensity. The Instagram captions Vanessa Bayer’s character dreams up in this scene will now be stuck in your brain forever.
“Saturday Night Live” and Please Don’t Destroy: Jumper (2023)
The internet is the great democratizer of sketch comedy, testing the boundaries of experimentation with the form with quick jump cuts, non sequiturs, and low-budget production values. Please Don’t Destroy rose to fame on YouTube and TikTok before making the jump (pun intended) to “SNL” with their web-tempered aesthetic intact.
Be brief. As Shakespeare once wrote, brevity is the soul of wit—both in idea and execution. The concept powering your sketch shouldn’t take more than a few words to explain (e.g., “food names that sound dirty”).
It’s also important to keep your page count low (our default page count is four). Cut out the fat and get to your main concept, pronto.
Build conflict. When thinking about your premises and characters, create comedic friction by putting two contextually different situations in conflict with each other. The more disparate they are from each other, the better. For example: “zombie apocalypse” and “racial microaggressions” are two wildly different themes that come together in this “Key & Peele” sketch.
End strong. It’s a good rule of thumb in general to surprise viewers, and that’s especially true when it comes to endings. We’ve all seen an “SNL” sketch that fizzles on its final line, cutting back to an establishing shot as the audience awkwardly realizes they should applaud, so make sure your sketches end on a slam dunk.
Thede, the Emmy nominee who created “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” told us she “learned very early on that the end of a sketch is the hardest part. If you can dismount in a way that leaves them laughing and doesn’t overstay your welcome, you’ve done your job.”
Ideas for final beats include heightening the feelings underpinning your characters beyond the specifics of the sketch (e.g., revealing the unusual character’s emotional devastation) or breaking the established premise so that the story literally can’t continue (e.g., murdering the unusual character with a hammer).
“A Black Lady Sketch Show” Courtesy HBO
Be broad but specific. You don’t have a lot of time in sketch, so you’ll want viewers to “get” your character as quickly as possible. This means that playing the part broad and exaggerated is a help, not a hindrance.
Broad doesn’t mean “general,” however; “general” is a stepping stone to vagueness. Find a specific, unique entry point into the character, then hammer it home so the audience will understand and remember the sketch.
Service the script. Sometimes, you’re playing the character whose absurd philosophy generates comedic conflict. At other times, you’re the voice of reason who has a relatable reaction to insanity. Occasionally, your role is simply there to create world-building texture—an usher at a movie theater, a server in a restaurant, etc. And sometimes, these roles will be mashed together or multiplied.
Analyze the script and determine your function so you can best service the sketch. You may not always be the person who gets the laugh, but you’ll help the piece as a whole get the laugh, which is always a noble goal.
Remember: Sketch is still theater. To avoid a tone of staid cleverness in your work, it’s vital to remember that the fundamentals of acting still apply. Make intentional choices, project to the back of the room, elevate the material through blocking and physicality, and commit.
Yes, sketch comedy is populated by broad characters who exist for five minutes to make us giggle before they disappear forever. But if you’re professional and take that silliness seriously, audiences will respond in kind.