writing comedy for tv (and other mediums)

6 weekly sessions

7pm-9pm

Tuesdays 7th June – 12th July

Join Chris Head - comedy teacher, director and author of Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage & Screen - for an inspiring comedy writing course that will get you creating characters, scenes, stories and having a laugh. Chris has 20 years of comedy teaching experience and is fresh from teaching at BBC Writersroom in London where his training was voted amongst the best of the entire year's writing coaching.

This course will take you through: 

- creating comedy characters

- writing character monologues

- putting your characters into comedy sketches and scenes

- taking your characters into a longer narrative, like TV sitcom, comedy drama or a play.

You might be exploring comedy writing:

- for TV, from sketch to sitcom writing
- for your own online and social media productions
- for stage comedy shows and performances
- or simply for pleasure!

Beginners welcome. Plus if you have some comedy experience already, this will be a good next step to develop your scriptwriting.  
 

HOW IT WORKS

We'll watch, analyse and discuss great comedy clips. There'll be fun creative exercises in the class and brainstorming. At the end of each session you'll be set a writing task and you'll share the material the following week for feedback and guidance.

The first two weeks on creating comedy characters will see you creating characters based on real people (friends, relatives, colleagues, bosses, partners!), combinations of people and pure imagination. To explore these characters in action you will write comedy monologues for them and we’ll look at how to convey character in your writing, how to structure your monologue and how to bring out the comedy.

Weeks 3 and 4 will see us putting characters you have created into comedy sketches and scenes. Learn how to write and structure a comedy sketch or scene, ways of ending the action on a funny moment and a whole host of comedy devices like false dawns, callbacks, dramatic irony, misdirection and more. You will also create some new characters across these sessions as you explore sketch writing.

In the final two weeks we’ll look at how the characters and sketches you have created can be developed into longer comedy narratives, like sitcom, comedy drama and plays. We’ll look at how to create an ensemble of characters for longer narrative form, how the form of the comedy sketch can guide scene writing in a longer narrative and plotting.

You will leave the course with:

- brand new characters

- sketches and scenes

- ideas and tools for  longer narratives

- and a group of comedy friends and collaborators.