I’ve been studying a lot of sketch comedy lately and writing my own sketches for a community theater show. And I’ve compiled a fair bit of analysis that may be of interest.

Not all good sketches play out quite this way, but it’s something to use as a guide.

1. Establish the situation.
2. State the main premise with a few jokes.
3. Introduce another premise (one to three jokes, often just a new character).
4. Return to the main premise, relieving it with the other for variety, escalating the conflict as you go.
5. End with a twist that confirms or destroys the main premise.

The Situation

This is merely the setting and characters involved in the sketch. The situation needs to be established very quickly and can often be done with a joke or two along the way that’s independent of the main premise.

For example, if the premise of the sketch is a crazy person trying to get a loan for a bad business venture, the sketch needs to first establish the scene as occurring in a bank near the loan officer’s desk. So you might have the loan officer talking with another bank employee and one or the other make a small joke between them. This might be something silly like a pun on “alone” or jokingly asking for a loan to get lunch.

The Main Premise

The key to a good comedy sketch is a solid main premise. This can usually be described in one sentence that itself makes people laugh, because it has an obvious incongruity or juxtaposition of two dissimilar things.

• A soft-spoken “landshark” can trick people into opening their door so it can eat them.
• An unfrozen caveman who became a lawyer is just as smarmy as any other lawyer but uses his background as a sob story for the jury.
• Celebrity Jeopardy with celebrities who are idiots and/or hate Alex Trebek and insult him and deliberately misinterpret questions.
• Two mysterious hosts are somehow able to show male “contestants” who their second wives will be in the future, each one younger than the next.

Most sketches are a battle between crazy characters (clowns) and sane characters (straight men). While clowns get a lot of laughs out of their antics, straight men get a lot of laughs out of their reactions (takes, comments, retorts, shouting, etc.).

Sketches can feature almost any number of clowns and straight men:

• One crazy character and a few sane characters who have to deal with them. (Crazy clerk vs customers)
• One or two sane characters and a few crazies they have to deal with. (Clerk vs crazy customers.)
• Two characters at odds who are both crazy but in different ways.
• One crazy character vs the audience (common for commercials and monologs).
• A character that is crazy compared to a straight man but sane compared to a crazier clown. (Groucho Marx often played straight man to Chico, & the idiot cops of Reno 911 often played straight men to crazy criminals.)

Escalating Emotions

Generally, events should escalate as the sketch goes on. This is usually because the straight man is frustrated with the clown or the clown is frustrated that his or her efforts to get something are being foiled. These events should generally follow naturally from each other and not be the result of new outside forces (except for when it’s a second premise temporarily relieving the main premise).

By the climax, characters should usually be much more emotional than at the beginning: angry, crying, indignant, baffled, disgusted, afraid, etc. The very end of the sketch usually allows that to ramp down.

The Twist

Sketches should ideally end with a big laugh. That’s usually done with a twist that reframes the situation or reveals something previously unseen. The twist at the end of a sketch can come in many forms.

• The crazy character or situation is revealed to be even crazier than it seemed.
• The straight man character is revealed to also be crazy.
• Characters resign themselves to a seemingly intolerable situation continuing anyway.
• The situation is interrupted by an outsider.
• Time runs out (event mentioned earlier occurs or TV show is “out of time”).

Common Types of Sketchs

• Shop with wacky customers or wacky shopkeepers
• Restaurant/bar with wacky customers or wacky server
• Office/workplace shenanigans (break room, firings, ad pitch)
• School shenanigans (kids, career day, parent-teacher conference)
• Ceremony shenanigans (funeral, anniversary, retirement)
• Driving a car shenanigans
• News/weather/commentator with wacky ideas about events
• Interview with wacky guest or by wacky interviewer
• Impressionist (what if X celebrity/character did Y?)
• Movie/TV show parody (a specific one or just the general type)
• Reimagining of historical event (Washington on weights & measures, More Cowbell)
• Imagining of event suggested by a fictional work (child character grown up, etc.)
• Crazy character/mini sitcom (Ed Grimly, Coneheads, Mary Katherine Gallagher)
• Absurd TV sitcom/drama (The Californians, Debbie Downer, MacGruber, It’s Pat)
• Absurd TV talk show (Church Lady, Chicago superfans, Barry Gibb Talk Show)
• Absurd TV cooking show
• Absurd TV game show
• Absurd TV commercial
• Absurd song or song parody
• Improv exercise as sketch (Bill Brasky friends, What the Hell is That, Garth & Kat sing)