Splash Biography

Our class will serve as a crash course in sketch comedy! After a brief overview of Chicago's significance in the history of improvisational and sketch theater, we will teach a fully participatory writing and acting class covering all the basics of sketch writing: developing an original premise, creating interesting characters and relationships, and conveying the joke to the audience. Through a couple of planned examples and a few improvisational theatre exercises to help kickstart the creative process, we hope to show students that everything is funny if you learn to look at it from a certain way. We'll start with events from our own lives and re-tell them in order to reveal what makes them humorous. Because sketches are basically short funny stories told by actors, we'll create sketches in small groups which will perform their ideas at the end of the class. EVERYONE is welcome, and absolutely no experience is required - just a willingness to learn and a commitment to listen to the ideas of others without taking yourself too seriously.