An amazing and wonderful thing has happened! After much deliberation (and some semi-ethical bribery) the powers that be have granted an extension to the application deadline for SketchFest Seattle 2012!

FINAL date for applications is now June 13th at Midnight which means you have an entire month to get your very best material together.

We can’t wait to see some of North America’s most hilarious groups represented, including our very own Seattle sketch scene. With two out-of-town and one local showcase, and a laughtastic Film Festival there are plenty of ways for you to share your talents with the crowd.

We can’t wait to see you all in the Fall!

I had the extreme pleasure of asking the comedy duo Charles (Charlie Stockman and Chuck Armstrong) a few questions about their experience in the world of sketch comedy. These were their responses, in all their glory:

I have to ask, when and how did your love of all things funny begin?

Charlie: I’ve always enjoyed the reward of making people laugh. I think most of us do. Comedians just need that reward in more regular doses. More specifically, when I started writing for the Stanford Chaparral in college was when I really started taking comedy seriously.

Chuck: I had a teacher, Jeannine Rogel, in the fourth grade she encouraged me to add humor to my short stories.  It was the first time anyone actually suggested I attempt to be funny.  I learned quickly that comedy resonates with people in a way few other things can.  Also, growing up in the Seattle area, it would be impossible to overstate the influence Almost Live on my impressionable young mind.  Its localness definitely imbued it with an odd empowering quality.  I remember watching it and thinking “this is something I would love to be a part of”.

So tell me about the BYOB, how did that start?

Charlie: We don’t actually exclusively perform in venues that are BYOB.Chuck: Though I suppose we have had something of a history of playing those types of house.  In which case it’s mostly a function of cutting our teeth doing shows in places that don’t have a liquor license, or in some cases don’t even technically count as a venue.  We did a show in the lobby of a theater, we did a show in the converted common area of an old run-down house in Ballard.  And to be honest, those shows can be the most fun, but the onus is on you to be both performer and host.Charlie:  You want people to have a good time at a comedy show, you want people relaxed, willing to laugh at what you put on stage.  A good comedy show, be it standup, sketch, improv, whatever, should feel not unlike a party, and any party that doesn’t have beer, well, that’s a pretty shitty party.  Ergo, BYOB.

When you guys struck out on your own, was there a great deal of planning or did it just feel right?

Chuck: Our first comedy venture was a weekly web-series called Seattle Untimely, which we started in 2007.

Charlie: Considering how much effort is required to create a weekly web series, I wish we would have put more planning into that.

Chuck: Well, we did plan, we planned a whole hell of a lot, I think the bigger problem was that we didn’t know what we were doing and we had no clue how to market the thing.  It’s almost impossible to get people to start watching something regularly on the Internet unless you give them a really compelling reason.  A lot of people would watch one episode, or we’d have some bit from the show, like Space Bear, go semi-viral, but trying to get repeat viewers or iTunes subscribers or UStream subscribers or any of that was incredibly difficult.  So the effort we’d put in to planning, writing, rehearsing, filming, editing, was absolutely massive compared to the response we’d typically get of, say, a hundred people watching.

Charlie: Yeah, I guess that’s what I meant when I said I wish we had put more planning into it. Anyway, our first live sketch performance happened because someone in Chuck’s improv class knew about Seattle Untimely and invited us to open for her sketch group.

Chuck: Yeah, Megan Hescock was her name, though she went by Moog.  She used to be really active in the improv scene here, but I haven’t seen her around in awhile and she produced a Sketch/Improv hybrid show called “Sketchprov” for which she asked us to open. When I agreed, I assumed she wanted to show our videos.  She did not.  So we wrote our first live show. And it was actually pretty well received.  Granted, the audience was basically our friends and a bunch of other comedians, but still, it went well. And more importantly, it was a lot more fun than spending twenty hours shooting and editing a video in exchange for some thumbs ups.

Charlie: After that we performed in a few more shows around Seattle, and got asked to appear on several PROK bills, which was a huge boost for us. Then, we were able to get a spot in the Seattle Sketch Fest, which was really like our first legitimate theater venue show.  It was the first time we had a technician.  And we’ve just been rolling from there.

What kind of advice would you give to greenhorn comedy duo’s on working as a team?

Chuck: In my experience, whenever we disagree about something, whichever one of us feels more strongly about his point of view tends to be right.

Charlie: Oh yeah, history is written by the victors, for sure. The other advice I would give is to write a lot of sketches.  It will help you wear down his guard, so that you can sneak in the Stoner Think Tank sketch.

Chuck: (eye roll)

What is your favorite sketch you ever performed?

Chuck: The Ghost of Patrick Swayze. It feels very much like a real argument even though it’s happening between a shallow, upstaging asshole and a preening, arrogant-cum-defensive, identity stealing ghost.  Also, Charlie’s portrayal of a self-congratulatory JD Salinger just kills me.  I almost crack every time.

Charlie: At the moment, I would say Classic Rock Reunion. I love when comedic tension is combined with legitimate dramatic tension, and I think that CRR is the closest we’ve come to achieving that.

What’s the worst thing about performing to an intoxicated crowd? What’s the best?

Charlie: Sometimes a really intoxicated audience member will decide to insert his own dialogue into the show. This is tricky because you’re usually playing Thomas Jefferson at the time, and you don’t want to break the scene by asking the person to politely STFU. This is especially tricky when the audience member in question is your friend.

Chuck: The best thing about an intoxicated crowd is that they will get rowdy when you want them to get rowdy. We have a sketch that revolves around me putting Charlie on the spot over and over again (e.g. making him do an impression, making him give a speech, making him give a eulogy), and with the support of a drunk crowd this sketch can really hit. We’ve had sixty people screaming at Charlie to do push-ups. That, incidentally, was the same show where our friend was inserting dialogue into our Thomas Jefferson sketch.

I hear you’re both Stanford men.  What invaluable lessons did you pick up there that apply to your act?

Charlie: Thank you for being a gracious interviewer and dropping the S-bomb for us. It saves us the trouble of having to shoehorn it in ourselves.

Chuck: I believe you already did.

Charlie: Right, well it’s nice to reinforce it. Anyway, we both wrote for the Stanford Chaparral, Stanford’s humor magazine. The Chaparral provided a great environment to do a lot of writing, cultivate our comedic sensibilities, and get some of the bad jokes out of our system. From the magazine, we got a lot better at writing jokes that had to stand on ideas and couldn’t rely on good performances to carry them.

Chuck: In fact, if I remember, Charlie, when you were editor you instituted a “no silly voices” rule when pitching ideas to the staff.  Basically, if it wasn’t compelling when read in an unaffected, west-coast accent, it wouldn’t make it in the magazine.  And when we started doing sketch, I think those sensibilities carried over.

Charlie: Which explains why our sketches tend to be heavy on jokes and standing around.

Chuck: I didn’t realize you could put anything else in a sketch.  What else is there beyond jokes and standing around?

Charlie: Walking around, I guess?

Chuck: Huh.

Charlie: Anyway, the most important comedy lesson we learned from Stanford is that you never know if the person you’re talking to is a Kennedy, so go easy on the sailboat jokes.

Do you have a structured sketch development process or does the hilarity just magically spill from your minds?

Chuck: There’s no codified process we adhere to, but the way sketches get written tends to follow a particular pattern.

Charlie: When one of us has an idea, we’ll usually banter about it and riff on some lines of dialogue, either in person or over IM. We also discuss feasibility, whether there’s a whole sketch there, and what’s the most compelling way to present it.

Chuck: Eventually, if we like an idea enough, one of us takes a crack at writing a first draft and passes it to the other one.  We’ll revise back and forth like that until we think it’s pretty close.  Sometimes that’s as few as two revisions, sometimes that’s as many as ten.

Charlie: Then we read it aloud maybe with some blocking, which almost always results in another rewrite.

Chuck: It turns out that people don’t begin sentences by saying “well” nearly as often as you might think.

Charlie: When we’ve finished writing, rewriting, rehearsing, and blocking we memorize the thing and put it on a stage.

Chuck: It usually then requires another rewrite after its first performance.  There’s just a ton you don’t know about a sketch until you get it in front of an audience.

I saw the sketches you did for WhizArtBang in 2010 on the YouTube and was really impressed by your ability to memorize the numbers for the first bit. Is this a natural talent or something that took extra practice?

Chuck: It’s funny that you mention that sketch specifically, because the character usually holds note cards to make sure we get the ratios right. Though we’ve done it without the note cards or just gone up with blank note cards and haven’t had any trouble. The note cards also make a nice beat for signifying to the audience that a particular sub-section of the joke is done.

Charlie: Soooo…

Chuck: So in answer to the broader question, not to sound too cliché, memorization is like a muscle. It’s much, much, easier for me now to memorize sketches than it was when we were getting started.

Charlie: We also have an advantage because we write everything we perform, so by the time we get to rehearsal we are already familiar with the dialogue and how we think it should be delivered.

All silliness aside, what’s so important about sketch comedy?

Chuck: This is always a difficult question for me to answer.  It’s tough to really get at what makes comedy compelling in the first place beyond: “it’s good.”  The best I can come up with, I think, is that really good comedy creates a kind of shared bond.  When everyone laughs, it’s because some idea resonated on a non-obvious level. And sketch comedy, in particular, is a really great form that allows you to briefly explore lots of different ideas.

Charlie: I would add that comedy is about making you see the world in a new way, and good comedy makes you see the world in a new, but still logical way. I think there’s value in that.

Any upcoming projects the world needs to know about?

Charlie: We, along with a host of other local comedians, will be teaching one of the classes in SketchFest’s Boot Camp series. Aspiring and established sketch comedians should sign up. Nobody should miss a chance to learn comedy from Mike Mathieu.

Chuck: We also have upcoming shows in the LA Comedy Festival on April 20th and 22nd, and at Victoria’s Intrepid Theatre on May 5th and 6th.

Charlie: Also, we just finished up writing and shooting some video pilots and sketches with Spike Friedman and some other members of Ubiquitous They and The Satori Group. They should hopefully be edited and online in the next couple months. We’ll announce it on Facebook when they are.

Chuck: In fact, all of these things will get announced on our Facebook page, which is facebook.com/charlescomedy

Charlie: Way to stick that in.

Chuck: You know how we do, marketing.

Charlie: Stanford.

Learn more about Charles and keep tabs on their upcoming shows on Facebook. If you’re interested in learning about the rehearsal process from these veterans of sketch, join them at the SketchFest Boot Camp April 2012.

Can you believe it!?  They started Friday night having not even met, and by Sunday they put on an awesome full-length sketch show!  But, like a solar eclipse, the big bang, or a rabid bear having high tea with a twelve foot tall anthropomorphic rubik’s cube, this is an event that can only be seen once in a long while!  If you were lucky enough to have been in the audience that night, consider yourself the recipient of one of the universe’s greatest gifts!  The sketches illuminated some of the human experience’s most poignant moments: the harrowing reality of frontline oral care with a Combat Dentist, that Divorce Talk moment when your parents inform you they’ve decided to spice up their marriage by brutally slaying the neighbors, and the final rounds of everyone’s favorite gameshow Carrot or Stick.

These guys slept, ate, and drank nothing but sketch comedy and pizza for 48 hours and it paid off like gangbusters!  (Yes, they drank pizza)  They began a ramshackle collection of sketch comedians and sketch comedy enthusiasts and left Mashuppers.  Some might call it an intense process.  And they’d be right!  It’s downright intense!  When someone asks one of the Mashuppers if they’re into sketch comedy, they will say “Yes… intensely so…”, make deep and meaningful eye contact, lean in, deliver a passionate kiss, and whisper “…intensely so…”

Big thanks to our Mash-Up organizer, Ryan Schmidt, the amazing folks at Wing-It productions for hosting the performance and of course all the participating artists who made the show incredible! Now go sleep it off…

Submissions for the annual Seattle Sketch Comedy Festival are now live! We are waiting with bated breath to see what kind of wonderful feats of comedic genius you have in store for the Emerald City. Visit the application page to submit and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us!

Here’s to another great year of hilarious antics in support of the fine art of sketch comedy.

Applications close on JUNE 13th at MIDNIGHT, so be sure to get your very best material together in time for the deadline!

OK, so we know what you are thinking:

What’s with all the crazy changes and totally outdated social media posts?

Well, we kind of figured no one would really be paying attention, but it turns out you really do like us! After an overwhelming* amount of concerned e-mails and messenger pigeons regarding the recent online activity we thought we’d let the anticlimactic cat out of the bag.

Basically we are just doing some spring cleaning, sprucing up the place if you will, all in an effort to support the creators and lovers of sketch comedy with a new (hopefully) functional and (debatably) attractive website. We promise, no shark jumping here…thanks for your patience and we’ll keep you posted on all the new features once they are ready to roll.

*Dramatization.

When two good things come together they can create something great but when many great things come together they can generate one glorious abomination of awesome…

Welcome to the MASHENNING!

Ready to be entertained by a cavalcade of comedic genius? Are you ready to be entertained ONE WEEK EARLIER THAN ANTICIPATED? You’re welcome. Though we can’t take all (or any) of the credit, The Entertainment Show will be having their monthly performance an entire 7 days in advance, so be sure to plug it into your PDA with that handy, dandy stylus before you forget!

March 18th at 8pm, Wing-It Theatre @ 5510 University Way NE

Tickets are $7

There’s a thing going on at a place! Check out Weird and Awesome with Emmett Montgomery March 4th at Annex Theatre on Capitol Hill. There are promises of songs and jokes; word on the street is they’ll be weird and awesome….

While reading the Seattle PI blog today (supposedly they have a new hard copy version as well, you should check it out), we found some news that made us a little sad. After over 30 years as Assistant Manager at the Comedy Underground, Carl Warmenhoven will be retiring to the dimly lit stages of local comedy clubs and focus on what he does best; making people laugh.

To say that it’s the end of an era may be true, but it is also a chance for a guy that has given new beginnings to performers all over the Seattle comedy community to experience a happy ending of his own…wait, no. What I meant to say was that Carl Warmenhoven has been giving happy endings to Seattle comics for many yea—damn it. Whoever’s end ends up happy, here’s to you Carl! On behalf of the Seattle sketch comedy community, we wish you happy trails….never mind…

Say Bon Voyage but NOT goodbye to a Seattle comedy legend and generally happy guy Carl Warmenhoven at the Comedy Underground on March 6^th  and don’t forget to catch his last show as Assistant Manager February 29th (tonight!) at the very same Comedy Underground at 8pm.

Friends of Sketchfest, REJOICE!  for this fancy new blog will have everything you need to bring honor to your family in the promising field of sketch comedy! Whether you plan to create, watch, edit or otherwise support this grand tradition we want to be there to cheer you on.

Aside from our annual Sketch Comedy and film festival, Sketchfest offers many other awesome opportunities throughout the year so check back or subscribe for updates and general amusement. Here are some of the great new things the site will offer on a regular basis:

EVENTS

These are funny things that are happening that you should go to. Have we ever steered you wrong?

INSKETCH

It takes a lot to keep Sketchfest Seattle running like the well-oiled machine it is; there are a lot of internal e-mail threads full of funny .gif’s that are of the utmost importance. Here you can keep yourself up to speed on the latest requests for volunteers, items of administrative importance and great new swag we have to offer. If you’re lucky, we’ll even share some teasers for this year’s festival but only if you are super good.

LAUGH

This is our excuse for perusing the interwebs for funnies. If you think something belongs here, send it in for consideration, though keep in mind we have some pretty high standards around here. We are not above posting videos of your cat provided he does an amazing Dom DeLuise impression.

LEARN

Hear about our upcoming classes, seminars and other educational opportunities because our mission to support the sketch comedy community doesn’t end at laughing at your questionable sense of humor when in mixed company. We’d love to hear from those that have attended classes too, so don’t be shy to share your experiences! Now just be sure you bring enough for everyone, y’hear?

NEWS

The comedy world is an exciting, sordid and at times even entertaining circus of delight. From new local venues opening up to new sketch related projects nationwide, we just want to keep you in the know. Also, I need to justify the Celebrity Gossip file on my Feedly site.

SKETCHFRIENDS

Want to get to know the performers or discover what it’s like to edit video for a sketch comedy show? Want to share your thoughts on the sketch writing process or tell your own “coming out of the comedy closet” story? We will be conducting irregularly scheduled interviews to further the world’s understanding and appreciation of this fine art. (Hehe… if you say that fast it sounds like fart.)

Please feel free to submit! We are excited to develop a vibrant community of artists and fans that can share their love of sketch comedy, and this process turns out to be a pretty collaborative effort. We may come from all walks of life, but we have something in common; our love of great humor.

Your journey is an honorable one because laughter is important. It has brought us through wars, recessions, shortages and even presidential election years. Through tough times it brings us to a place where we can survive; in great times it brings us back down to where we need to be. So keep fighting the good fight by bringing happiness to the world and we will be here to support you.

You probably didn’t read all the way through this (it’s like 600 words, come ON) but for those that did, we feel you deserve a reward. So now, back to our roots…

Don’t see something you wanna? Comment below or contact Nikki by the electronic mail blog@sketchfest.org and we’ll talk it through.