I LOVE pitch meetings.* At their best, they’re the perfect middle ground between work and play — a chance to bat around sketch ideas with your friends. But I realized that if you’ve never been on a sketch team or in a sketch class, you probably haven’t ever gotten to see a pitch meeting in action. … Until now! A few months ago, I put out feelers to a bunch of different sketch teams to see if they’d be willing to share their pitch meeting. To my absolute delight, a fantastic UCB NY Maude team** called First Wife (directed by Chet Siegel) generously agreed! They recorded their meeting earlier this month, and I’m so excited to share it with you now. Their pitches are so funny — but, even more importantly, they do such a wonderful job of supporting, developing, and playing with each other’s ideas. This meeting embodies so many of my favorite things about sketch, and we’re all so lucky they let us be flies on the wall. If you’ve never seen a sketch pitch meeting before, I think you’ll learn a lot from this. And if you HAVE seen sketch pitch meetings before, I think you’ll still have a great time watching this one. Huge thanks to First Wife and Chet Siegel. And go check out their show on October 5th, at 7pm ET! I’m excited to see what sketches make it in! WRITERS: JR Atkinson, Henry Block, Rel Francis, and Charlotte Polk ACTORS: Allisha Edwards, Luke Halferty, Shannon Keye, Jack Maloney, Harris Solomon, and Julia Zhen Directed by Chet Siegel *A pitch meeting is the first meeting in the cycle of a new sketch show. The members of a sketch team, led by a director, share their ideas with each other, and collectively tease out where those ideas might go. Over the next few weeks, those ideas turn into drafts of sketches. Then those drafts become rewrites. And then those rewritten sketches are whittled down into a lineup that becomes the show. Over the course of the month, a writer might write anywhere from 3 - 6 different sketches for consideration. ** Maude teams are UCB’s sketch house teams, assembled by the Artistic Director based on packets (for writers) and auditions (for actors). Thanks for reading Unusual Things: A Guide to Sketch Comedy! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marinatempelsman.substack.com
