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Last week, Paper Magazine published an interview I did with David Cross about the new season of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. Given the opportunity to interview Cross, I had to pick his brain about sketch comedy (duh). We talked for a little while about sketch endings, which, for me, are always the toughest part to write; I left most of that out of the interview, because 99.999% of Paper’s readers don’t care whether a call-back or a non-sequitur are more effective as a blackout line. But anyway, here’s part of the interview that did run, and since Tumblr is crawling with sketch nerds like me, I thought you might find it interesting:  Most people became familiar with you and your work on Mr. Show. What lessons in your experience as a sketch comedian did you apply to the creative process on Todd Margaret? Well, that’s an interesting question. I’m not sure. I guess the first thing I’d have to do is answer what I learned as a sketch comic. I guess it’d be the economy of telling a story in four minutes. And going back to Mr. Show, and even before that when I had a sketch group in Boston, a lot of my sketches would tell a story, or would be about a character, and there’s a build, a mini-arc to what’s happening. One of the things as a young comedy aficionado teen, going into my 20s and 30s, I was always irritated by sketches that just ended. A lot of SNL sketches, if there’s a title to the sketch, you know exactly what’s going to happen. They do the same thing for five minutes, over and over again, and then it just ends. And that always frustrated me, and I didn’t care for it. It seemed very lazy. So I suppose the answer is that it’s the economy of telling a story quickly, which really gets applied in the writing and editing of Todd Margaret, as opposed to the performance. I suppose that’s an answer. It is.  I guess you could extrapolate that into the whole idea of this show. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just told over 12 episodes instead of in a five-minute sketch. 

Last week, Paper Magazine published an interview I did with David Cross about the new season of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. Given the opportunity to interview Cross, I had to pick his brain about sketch comedy (duh). We talked for a little while about sketch endings, which, for me, are always the toughest part to write; I left most of that out of the interview, because 99.999% of Paper’s readers don’t care whether a call-back or a non-sequitur are more effective as a blackout line. But anyway, here’s part of the interview that did run, and since Tumblr is crawling with sketch nerds like me, I thought you might find it interesting: 

Most people became familiar with you and your work on Mr. Show. What lessons in your experience as a sketch comedian did you apply to the creative process on Todd Margaret?

Well, that’s an interesting question. I’m not sure. I guess the first thing I’d have to do is answer what I learned as a sketch comic. I guess it’d be the economy of telling a story in four minutes. And going back to Mr. Show, and even before that when I had a sketch group in Boston, a lot of my sketches would tell a story, or would be about a character, and there’s a build, a mini-arc to what’s happening. One of the things as a young comedy aficionado teen, going into my 20s and 30s, I was always irritated by sketches that just ended. A lot of SNL sketches, if there’s a title to the sketch, you know exactly what’s going to happen. They do the same thing for five minutes, over and over again, and then it just ends. And that always frustrated me, and I didn’t care for it. It seemed very lazy. So I suppose the answer is that it’s the economy of telling a story quickly, which really gets applied in the writing and editing of Todd Margaret, as opposed to the performance. I suppose that’s an answer.

It is. 

I guess you could extrapolate that into the whole idea of this show. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just told over 12 episodes instead of in a five-minute sketch. 

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