THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
US comedy duo Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, collectively known as BriTANicK have been nominated for an Emmy, been named in Variety's Top 10 Comics to Watch, have written for Saturday Night Live and It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Last year they made their Edinburgh debut with a brand-new live show directed by multi-award winning comedian Alex Edelman, which resulted in a sell-out run and a lot of critical acclaim. Exclusively for The American, here they write about the differences they've found between writing for major US TV shows, and writing for your own sketch show. And what it's like writing for British audiences.
Off the bat, one of the great joys of writing our own sketch comedy is that we don't need to adhere to any rules. We love structure, but being able to bend sketches to our chaotic whims and create meta moments has always been something we revel in that TV doesn't allow as much. TV shows are also much more of a collaborative effort, which can be a gift and a burden. You lose some of your own specific voice, but you get to become a part of something much larger. There's also the added benefit of someone else being the tiebreaker for an argument, so the two of us don't spend a week arguing over whether "grape" or "plum" is a funnier fruit. (we're leaning plum).
When we write BriTANicK sketches, we are also writing for ourselves. Since we play the characters, the dialogue is naturally in our voices, so we gravitate to things that are more personal to us, whether it's particular things we gripe about or emotions we feel comfortable in. When you write for TV for other voices, you really are finding the comedy that is best suited for the situation, which is sometimes not as natural but can be a great way to expand your style.
Another major difference, though it might not sound so important, is the necessity of tight deadlines in television. With our own stuff, we can craft and argue about a sketch for so much longer than it has any right to take up in our lives. Even after we perform it, we can keep shaping it forever. With TV, it demands you find a solution and quickly. TV deadlines can seem like such a capitalistic burden, but in reality it's one of the few things that makes us actually find an endpoint to our work.
We've also found a huge difference in writing for the screen vs. the stage. When we write for the screen, we're often taking into account the genre, tone, music, and editing of the sketch, and which ideas will be funniest utilizing those tools. Onstage, our sketches are much more physical and verbal, relying on the things we say and do providing the laugh.
One wonderful thing we've discovered is that UK audiences tend to align with a lot of our humor, so we haven't needed to adjust our material that much (aside from changing "Fanny pack" to "Bum Bag"!) We do find the most interesting thing with different audiences is changing how the punchline lands… Some audiences like a little more nuance where others want the joke to appear clearly. We have to always be refining, because the audience is the true difference between TV and live. Television makes you cement a piece of humor in writing and let it go, whereas live performance lets you constantly shape the way a joke or moment lands. The more we perform, the more we realize how alive our show is, and how it's always molding itself to each moment, making every performance as unique as a rare plum. (See? Way better than grape)
