Sketch Comedy Show Production
What are the challenges of producing sketch comedy shows?
It's hard to find good enough writers to do it. It's has become easier because of the slow death of multi-camera sitcoms. There are more writers out there. There used to be a time when Saturday Night Live or Letterman would pluck writers from the Harvard Lampoon, put them in jobs on the network shows, and then after 2 years on the job they'd leave to write movies or come to Hollywood to do The Simpsons or whatever the show of the day was. Now that there aren't so many of those, there's a much bigger pool of writers who know how to do character and know how to do story type stuff.
How did Mind of Mencia get started?
It's funny, when I started the Mind of Mencia on Comedy Central, we originally did the pilot for the show as if it were a late night talk show and we had guests. And he was a great interviewer. He really did a nice job interviewing which surprised me. And I had the idea, I said why are we doing guests, let's just do the type of comedy that you see on late night TV but without the talk.
What is a typical shoot day like on Mind of Mencia?
It's different from a daily show because when you do a show like the Mencia show it's a heavily rehearsed show. On show day we get in on the morning, we do a run through of the show, just the dry run through without cameras, without any kind of technical on the stage, just a walk through. Then, the director does camera blocking. Then we come back and we rehearse from start to finish the show with cameras with full facilities. Then after that full run through, we do just work on individual things like blocking and stuff like that. The writers generally do some sort of rewriting at that time and then usually at 5 or 6 or so we do a dress rehearsal which is start to finish without stopping which also is used when we edit the show to provide additional shots and second takes and things like that. Then we let the audience in. There's a warm-up not too long. We don't let them get bored too quickly and we do a show. I like doing a show from start to finish. I'm not a big fan of starting and stopping.
How did you come up with the format for Mind of Mencia?
The format for Mencia was pretty simple. He had done a lot of development at the networks, and they'd always want to put him in a sitcom. They'd always want to put him in a character part, and I had always said that he's not an actor, he's a reactor. So when we formatted the show, we always wanted to make it stem from his stand-up comedy. We used to always use the term 'dressing the pig'. We would dress the pig up any way, but essentially everything he does on that show, if it's done right, is just stand-up comedy dressed up in a different way. He was always great at reacting. Give him something reactive, give him someone in the street, give him someone in the audience, give him a celebrity on film or a picture or whatever, and he'll react better than most people out there.
