On January 19, 2009, Chicago teacher and playwright Joe Janes decided to write a comedy sketch a day for a year. He did that. When he was done, Don Hall of the WNEP Theater Foundation decided to produce them. All of them. In June of 2010, Don and Joe gathered together over 200 Chicago actors and directors and over eleven nights presented 26 shows each featuring two weeks worth of sketches (although one has 15 scenes). Yep. Crazy. All 365 comedy sketches are collected in this book along with a complete list of directors and actors from the Strawdog shows. Joe teaches comedy writing at The Second City and Columbia College.

Biopics and other movies and television shows based on real events are increasingly appearing at the multiplex and on streaming platforms alongside blockbuster franchises and adaptations. The appeal of movies and television shows based on true stories is that they claim to tell us what really happened, with the public and private versions of events packaged into one coherent narrative. But how do they do it, and what makes this version of events so appealing? The Biopic and Beyond investigates the process that turns the distant public figures that populate news and entertainment into screen characters that we can engage with and try to understand a little better. Even though they aren't the real thing, our engagement with fictionalized versions of public figures can, for better or worse, color the way we understand the real person behind them. Screen engagement with the fake person behind the real person doesn't only happen in biopics and docudramas, with media as varied as sketch comedy, fan fiction and the celebrity cameo contributing to the ways we understand public figures. Using case studies such as Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network, Sarah Palin and Saturday Night Live, and Louis C.K. and Louie, The Biopic and Beyond will make you think about the way you see the world through a fictionalized version of it.

This dissertation examines sketch comedy on television, film, and the Internet in the last 30 years, particularly its role within media industry constructions of innovation and differentiation. I argue that sketch comedy's textual qualities mirror recent media industrial infrastructures and practices that prize malleable content able to move flexibly across platforms and serve a number of commercial needs. But at the same time, the producers and performers of sketch comedy use this textual variability to negotiate their own notions of distinction, ones that often do not align with the industry's pursuit of profit. I elaborate the tension between these two forces in case studies of the television sketch comedy The State, the comedic film performances of former Saturday Night Live stars, and Internet shorts from FunnyorDie.com and The Onion, utilizing original archival material, production ethnography, interviews, and scholarly, trade, and popular press resources. These analyses shed new light on the production and performative strategies of popular comedic media, as well as how those media serve as a site for negotiating preferred industry practices.

Some of the best evidence for the early development of literary criticism before Plato and Aristotle comes from Athenian Old Comedy. Playwrights such as Eupolis, Cratinus, Aristophanes and others wrote numerous comedies on literary themes, commented on their own poetry and that of their rivals, and played around with ideas and theories from the contemporary intellectual scene. How can we make use of the evidence of comedy? Why were the comic poets so preoccupied with questions of poetics? What criteria emerge from comedy for the evaluation of literature? What do the ancient comedians' jokes say about their own literary tastes and those of their audience? How do different types of readers in antiquity evaluate texts, and what are the similarities and differences between 'popular' and 'professional' literary criticism? Does Greek comedy have anything serious to say about the authors and texts it criticizes? How can the comedians be related to the later literary-critical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle and subsequent writers? This book attempts to answer these questions by examining comedy in its social and intellectual context, and by using approaches from modern literary theory to cast light on the ancient material.

Characters: 1 female, 1 male; or 2 male or 2 female (sketches vary.) Each sketch runs approximately 10 minutes. Minimum costume requirements; few, if any props needed. Bare stage productions possible. Sketches range from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the edgy to the surreal — and sometimes combine all in one sketch! Pick and choose among the 14 wildly surprising sketches. Unpredictable, peculiar and outrageous. This collection is proudly non-family-friendly. A brilliant challenge to gifted actors. Some sketches rely on physical humor more than others. In the “Over-Achiever” there is a very successful man who is jealous of his ex-wife who has just been made the first female Pope in the Church's history. “Mediocrity” features a straight-laced female manager who is successful in preventing the bored Brad from quitting his job at the Department of Mediocrity. In “Blast Off”, Bob is going to have trouble if he goes to Planet Venus because, after all, they have beings of three different sexes there, but none are female. And these are just three of the sketches...