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Briar TourCritical StatementA Capstone Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Renée Crown University Honors Program at Syracuse UniversityColleen McCarthyCandidate for Bachelor of Degree (B.S.) and Renée Crown University Honors Spring 2020Capstone Sponsor: Professor Ben FrahmCapstone Reader: Professor Evan Smith? (Colleen McCarthy, 4/24/2020)AbstractIn this paper, I reflect on the process of writing my original sketch comedy pilot, Briar Tour. I will examine what personal and career choices led me to want to do comedy screenwriting and what has shaped my preferences within the world of comedy screenwriting, particularly sketch comedy television shows. As I analyze this long process of figuring out what mode of writing I wanted to pursue, I will discuss shows that have influenced me and my writing throughout my time at Syracuse. I will then discuss the process of writing my capstone, which in my case was a bit of a meandering path. I will explain the lessons I learned about working with your strengths and how to adapt on the fly. I will discuss how my work with my sponsor Professor Ben Frahm and my reader Professor Evan Smith helped me to refine and develop my work to be as accessible to non-sketch comedy fans as it could be and while still staying true to my voice and my passion.Finally, I will outline the lessons that I have learned throughout this entire process, and how those specific, practical lessons will serve me in my future endeavors.AcknowledgementsFirst, I would like to thank my sponsor Professor Ben Frahm for dedicating an incredible amount of time toward helping me write and refine this script. I could not have done it without your help and support. I learned so much from you, like how to keep a narrative arc strong even within a comedy work, and the invaluable practical lessons about the process of taking notes and re-writing, which I know will serve me well in the future. Thank you to Professor Evan Smith, my reader, for all of your notes and support. Even during this challenging time of doing everything remotely, your willingness to go through every page and offer comments was so helpful. You were always so encouraging while still giving notes as if I was professional, which is something I really benefitted from. I would like to thank Karen Hall. Through this entire process, which in my case has been a bit of a meandering road, you have always been there to offer your help and support. Knowing that I could come to you with any question or concern was a crucial element in my being able to complete this project successfully. Thank you to the Renée Crown University Honors program for allowing me to challenge myself and to delve deeper into academic material. I have been able to learn lessons that transcend the academic realm. In some of my honors classes, I have been able to learn practical life lessons and lessons about humanity that I know I would not have encountered outside of the honors program. To all of my honors professors, especially, Professor Gorovitz and Professor Schramm, thank you for making your classes a place where students feel at home to express themselves—to ask questions, share opinions and personal stories, and speak freely without fear of judgement. Treating your classes like a family is undoubtedly beyond your job description, but it made all the difference to me, so thank you.Executive SummaryThroughout this process, I have worked on my capstone project, which ended up culminating in an original sketch-comedy pilot called Briar Tour. Briar Tour is about college life on the fictional Briar University campus. The logline is as follows:Overzealous university tour guide, Ken, takes several prospective students and their families on a tour of his beloved Briar University, but it soon becomes clear that Briar is not as perfect as Ken may think. My script features four original sketches entitled Saltine Feast, Say Yes to the Meds, Stupid-Ass Face, and Rushing Tri-Chi. The loglines for these individual sketches are as follows:Saltine Feast – Struggling freshmen Tim, Lennie, and Phil scour the fruitless dining hall for any source of edible food before finally resorting to their favorite last resort, a saltine cracker feast in their dorm room.Say Yes to the Meds – Billy aka Pink Eye goes to the health center in hopes of getting some prescription eye-drops, but instead becomes involuntarily wrapped up in a game-show style appointment where he must choose between three pre-determined mystery meds.Stupid-Ass Face – A frustrated Professor Baldwin asks Ken to stay after class to discuss his repeated class disruptions. Ken has no idea what he could have done wrong until he finally makes his uber-offensive concentrating face.Rushing Tri-Chi – Lauren rushes a sorority thinking she is searching for genuine connections, but when Tri-Chi promises her hundreds of Instagram followers and the best parties on campus, she chooses shining superficiality instead. All of these sketches are tied together by a narrative device of a tour for prospective students that allows the audience to understand the context of the sketches. The tour allows the audience to understand the world wherein these absurd characters and narratives exist.Table of ContentsAbstract......................................................................................................................................2Executive Summary..................................................................................................................3Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................4Chapter 1: The Road To Sketch Comedy..............................................................................7Chapter 2: The Process..........................................................................................................11Chapter 3: Lessons for the Future........................................................................................14Works Cited............................................................................................................................18Chapter 1: The Road to Sketch ComedyWhen I applied to Syracuse University, I applied to Newhouse as a Magazine major. For the majority of high school, I knew I wanted to write. I always liked poetry and creative writing. I knew I wanted to write creatively in my career someday, but I really did not know what realm I wanted to write in. Magazine sounded creative, so I decided on that. But comedy had also been a huge part of my life as well, in ways that were too informal for me to recognize the significant role it would eventually play in my career path. I had always liked to tell stories. Most people that knew me in high school knew me as one of the quirkiest people they had ever met, which I always took as a compliment, and as the girl with the most embarrassing stories they had ever heard, for which I was always proud. Before my decision to go to Syracuse, I came to campus to tour Newhouse and meet with the chair of the Magazine major, Ms. Melissa Chessher. Although she was extremely warm and welcoming, I was very nervous. Even though I was mostly asking her questions, I was sure that somehow all of my responses would weigh into whether I got accepted into Newhouse. For that reason, I wanted to sound as smart and witty and quick as possible, and the best way I knew how to prove my quick wit was making people laugh. I distinctly remember as I walked out of her office, she gestured to the half-empty tray of pastries at the reception desk, “You are welcome to help yourself. Although I apologize, it looks like it’s down to a few sad bagels.”I happily grabbed a bagel, and wanting to assure her that their “sad” appearance was not a concern to be I quipped back, “Don’t worry about it. My face is a sad bagel after that long drive.”Going into freshman year, one of my favorite embarrassing stories to share with fellow Sadler-ites was the time that something possessed me to refer to my face as a sad bagel during a meeting with the Magazine chair. This story, and the many others like it, were a main component of my personality. Comedy helped me to relate to others and feel more connected, although I did not realize its significance yet.As I started my college career in as a double major in Magazine and Writing and Rhetoric, I soon determined that I was lacking the creative freedom that I wanted. Up until sophomore year, I thought my dream was to work for a magazine like Glamour and write beauty product reviews for the rest of my days. Then, when I took Professor Rhinehart’s writing class, Digital Identities, and wrote my own blog centered around the type of writing I thought I wanted to do, which was weekly beauty product reviews, I soon realized this style of writing did not satisfy me. I missed story. I wanted to be able to write my own narratives from the depths of my imagination with as few rules or guidelines as possible. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to take part in that class because Professor Rhinehart gave us full freedom in terms of our writing style and subject matter. Doing exactly what I thought I wanted to do and realizing that it was not at all what I wanted to do was a crucial turning point in my college career.Around the same time, a friend introduced me to the sketch comedy show, Portlandia. I remember that the first few episodes I watched were pretty incomprehensible to me. Why were two main actors dressing up in funny little wigs and portraying dozens of different bizarre characters? But after a few episodes digesting the strange nature of sketch comedy format, I was hooked. Girls had been one of my favorite shows throughout high school, but something like Portlandia was weirder, more absurd, and even more open-ended. Sketches could be any crazy thing a writer could think up. That is when I decided to switch my major to Television, Radio, and Film and started to think very seriously about the prospect of being a comedy screenwriter. That is when it hit me that all my little odd-ball stories and my quirky personality could actually be a factor in my career path. That is when everything started to feel like the right fit. I delved into sketch comedies like Portlandia, Saturday Night Live, and Documentary Now!, and I began to try to write short comedy scenes. It felt really difficult and daunting at first because now that I really knew what I wanted to do, I was afraid to fail. In my Television, Radio, and Film classes, I avoided writing comedy. I was hesitant because as soon as I wrote in the genre I wanted to, I was going to find out whether I was actually any good at it. So, for the rest of sophomore year, I wrote sci-fi narratives. I was getting closer, but I was still afraid to fail.The summer before junior year, I had a bit of a traumatic experience in my personal life, shortly before I returned to school in the fall. I did return to Syracuse for about two weeks, until I realized I needed to go home, seek counseling, and take some time with my family. While I was home, writing was my distraction. I began to write a comedic pilot about all that had happened to me that summer and how my Crohn’s disease only complicated those circumstances further. It felt good to be writing a sitcom. It felt as natural as I had hoped. I brought my work to a screenwriting professor at the University of Pittsburgh that I had been in contact with, and he thought it showed promise. More importantly, he thought it was funny. For the first time, I had hope that I could be good at comedy screenwriting, and I could put myself out there and be vulnerable in that way. I did not end up doing anything with the particular pilot that I wrote that fall, and although I credit it for being a turning point in my career and in learning about myself, I have no desire to revisit it. I have always used comedy as a way to process difficult truths and trauma, but I did not yet understand the complicated nuances of how to satirize trauma in healthy ways. There was a difference between downplaying and making light of my own pain and honoring my truth while satirizing the bad guys. There is a delicate balance between satire and respect, and the very important lesson I learned in this case was to always make fun of the bad guy and not the victim. With that in mind, I would go on to process what I needed to process and come out a stronger human and a stronger screenwriter. A writer who could use comedy as a healthy coping mechanism that brings people together and sheds light on injustice.In the spring, I rejoined the Syracuse community in Los Angeles for the Syracuse University Los Angeles semester. Being in Los Angeles was really inspiring to me, and it alleviated any of my lingering hesitations from sophomore year. Everyone in LA had a dream and was just winging it, and it became clear that there was never going to be a better time to start writing in the voice and format that I wanted to. I just had to go for it. That semester, I dreamt up and started writing a script called Super-Salad Me, which was formatted very similarly to one of my favorite mockumentary shows, Documentary Now!. As my SULA peers and professors seemed to like this piece, I decided that producing this could be my capstone. Chapter 2: The ProcessBetween my semester off for my medical leave in the fall of 2018 and returning to campus unconventionally for Syracuse University Los Angeles in the spring of 2019, my capstone process had a bit of a rocky start. Karen was extremely helpful and understanding of my extenuating circumstances, so with her guidance, I wrote up a proposal for my capstone toward the end of my junior year. I decided on producing my mockumentary-style original script, Super-Salad Me. I planned to start by doing a few rewrites until I could get the script as polished as possible, and then I was going to produce a half-hour live action episode using my script. I spent the fall of my senior year writing and rewriting this script and working with my sponsor to get my script ready for production. I continued re-rewriting up until winter break. As a writer, I am never fully happy with my work, so I was content to keep re-writing and was struggling to find a stopping point there. At the same time, I was starting to really dread the production process for several reasons.Before I proposed producing my Super-Salad Me script as a half-hour episode, I did not have much experience outside of class with production and cinematography. During the fall of this year, I joined Syracuse After Hours, a student-run sketch comedy group, which led to a few realizations that really ended up impacting my capstone project. First of all, as we worked on producing our sketches each weekend, I saw how much time and effort goes into production. Twenty of us would work for two weeks just to get one polished five-page script produced and edited. I started to think that I really overestimated my ability to be able to direct, produce, and edit with limited experience and time. At the same time, I was really enjoying pitching new sketch ideas and writing new scripts for Syracuse After Hours. It became clear to me that another thing I really loved about sketch comedy was that it always feels fresh. You write a sketch and when it is done, you get to create a whole new sketch with new characters and conflicts. I missed writing and creating, and I craved the creative satisfaction of doing something brand new. At the same time, I wanted to focus on my strengths. I would much rather have a well done and polished script than a half an hour episode made by a girl who was picking up a camera for the first time. Thus, I went to Karen and told her that I think I needed to change my project. Over Christmas break, I had written and re-written two new sketches to get a jumpstart on my proposed new project. Luckily, Karen was very understanding as always, and she said as long as my sponsor was on board with my change, so was she. Professor Frahm was very supportive as well. He knows I am a writer at heart and was willing to switch gears and give me notes on my new material. Over the next couple months, I wrote and rewrote tirelessly. I heavily referenced a book by my reader, Professor Evan Smith, called Writing Television Sitcoms, as well as a book that Professor Frahm utilized in his screenwriting class, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. These books reminded me to focus on narrative arc and character development even within the less-structured sketch comedy format, and thanks to Professor Frahm, I believe we managed to keep those components at the forefront of my script. I wrote about what was freshest in my mind—college life. I have really enjoyed my college experience, but as someone who has always been a bit cynical, I started to find humor in people’s blind loyalty to their university, and to college life itself. I thought it could be interesting to satirize some of the less-glamorous implications of college and college life, while juxtaposing the chaos with loyal and over-zealous characters that seem to miss any imperfections that exist within the college realm. At the same time, I utilized the absurdist tone that made me fall in love with Portlandia. The device of a character acting in a completely absurd way who acts like they are acting completely normally was one I wanted to emulate. This is a technique I love as a consumer of media and as a writer because comedy is all about surprises and the unexpected. If someone was somehow absurd, but they knew it, we would not find it funny. But a character’s unawareness of their own absurdity can be a really powerful comedic device. At the same time, I referenced I Think You Should Leave, another of my favorite sketch comedy shows, to emulate a conflict that builds, usually in increments of three, and ends in an angry blowout. This was mostly clearly referenced in my sketch Stupid-Ass Face. Overall, I feel really proud of my end product, and I can confidently say that I stayed true to myself and my unconventional tone. Even though sketch comedy is pretty niche, I feel that I made it as digestible as possible for consumers.Chapter 3: Lessons for the FutureThe process of finding my true passion and then crafting a capstone project to fit that passion has taught me many invaluable lessons that I know will serve my well in my future endeavors. First of all, in trying to figure out what I wanted to do for my first two years of college, I learned not to settle in my career endeavors. I thought I was lucky to find any sliver of interest in whatever career I chose, throughout my college career, my perspective has completely shifted. It is now clear to me that my career should encapsulate all of my interests wrapped into one, and if it does not, I need to keep searching. I feel so lucky to have found a realm that I feel I have that potential to be good at that also happens to be really entertaining and fulfilling work for me. This will be something I will take with me into the future, and I will keep in mind that my work should be enjoyable. Of course, I will probably have to start out in entry-level jobs that are not exactly what I want to do. But because of this experience, I will remember not to become complacent and not to get stuck. If I feel like there is no room for growth in my job anymore, I will not be afraid to take a risk and move on. In working with Karen and Professor Frahm to rework my capstone proposal, I learned to focus on my strengths. In my career endeavors going forward, I will offer my strengths explicitly, but I will not overwhelm myself with areas of the entertainment industry that I do not excel in. As someone who is not very tech-savvy, I will work on my cinematography and production skills privately before I take the leap to try and do them professionally. I do not want a project of mine to be mediocre, so I will not produce anything on my own until I have practiced, and I feel ready. In working with Professor Frahm, I learned a lot about how to take notes as a writer. Professor Frahm is predominantly a film screenwriter, and I am predominantly geared toward television screenwriting and comedy. Undoubtedly, narrative arc and character development should be at the forefront of both, and I was in great hands in terms of his ability to critique finetune these components. At the same time, Professor Frahm was not super familiar with sketch comedy specifically. Since I was initially disoriented with the unique style of sketch comedy when I first discovered Portlandia, I definitely understood. With his help and suggestions, I tried to make my work as accessible as possible to as wide of an audience as possible. I wanted my script to be something that anyone could enjoy, regardless of their preference of genre in the television and film world. Professor Frahm and I also discussed how to tell the difference between important notes and differences in style. He explained that going forward, there would always be people who do not have the same exact style as me, and it is up to me as a writer to determine which notes are relevant and necessary and which might be stylistic discrepancies between me and whomever I am working with. He also taught me to look for “the note under the note.” This means that when giving notes, people do not always accurately recognize the problem they are seeing in a script. He gave the example of shoes. If people keep asking why a character’s shoes are gray, they may truly be having an issue with the character and how that decision factors into his character development. It is up to me as the writer to analyze and interpret those notes and find what the specific problem with the script truly is. These lessons are definitely going to be crucial going forward as a screenwriter, and I feel very lucky to have learned them in such a safe and encouraging environment.Working with my reader, Professor Smith, I was reminded to not be afraid of failure. Professor Smith has been very encouraging throughout, but he also manages to be very straightforward and speak to me as he would another screenwriting professional. He gave me his specific notes honestly, and by my request, held me to the standard of a professional screenwriter. After we finished our conversation, he reminded me to never be afraid of failure. He reminded me that even writers on shows like Saturday Night Live have far more sketches that get rejected than they do sketches that make it on air. He reminded me that this is not something to be afraid of; if I keep writing, I will succeed. This is a principle that I will need throughout my career. I know there will be failures and rejections, but if I keep writing, I will accomplish what I want. He reminded me that being a screenwriter is not about skill, it’s about persistence. With that in mind, I will write until I succeed.Finally, I have learned the power of comedy as a healer. I have learned that I must process something fully and truthfully before I can make light of it in front of others. I have learned the delicate balance of satire and justice as well as the importance of choosing the right target for satire, which should always be the oppressor and not the victim. Comedy is not kicking someone when they are down, and it is not about further ostracizing marginalized groups. It is not always done correctly, and I will need to remember to be brave and speak up if I see it done incorrectly in the future. At the center of comedy needs to be the realization that what you say, what you laugh at, if done incorrectly, could mock someone’s deep pain. Comedy done correctly should be the exact opposite. It is about pointing out the injustices of oppressors and using humor to demonstrate wrong and right, and in that way, when done correctly, comedy can bring us closer the truth and closer to justice.In terms of the impact of my project, I hope it can have a healing effect during this time. With everyone home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are living with a lot of fear and uncertainty. Changes in lifestyle, job security, living situations, and academic environments can certainly cause a lot of stress. For me, laughter is the best medicine, and I know we are all missing our Syracuse home right now. Reading through my sketches and remembering the crazy, messy, chaotic, sometimes unideal, but wonderful life we had at Syracuse brings me a sense of familiarity and peace. I hope that readers can recognize that same sense of home in reading my script. As a comedy writer, I only satirize what I know and love, and this piece is no different.At the same time, I do think it is healthy to always question your own loyalties and complacencies. There are small injustices hiding everywhere, and satire is meant to point out some of the systematic flaws that we may not recognize in our everyday lives. Thus, I hope my capstone is also a reminder to question institutions and to evaluate and re-evaluate personal loyalties. I think it is important not to think in black and white, but rather to find the gray areas in between which hold truth. My main character, Ken, is blindly loyal to his institution and refuses to hear of its flaws. To me, refusing to take criticism is foolish. In order to progress, whether socially, economically, or personally, one must be willing to examine the pros and cons of every situation and take criticisms where appropriate. For this reason, I hope my project reminds my audience to be skeptical and to continuously be willing to rebuild and improve.Works CitedSmith, Evan S. Writing Television Sitcoms. Perigee Books, 1999.Snyder, Blake. SAVE THE CAT!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. Michael Wiese , 2013.Television Shows ReferencedArmisen, Fred; Brownstein, Carrie; Krisel, Jonathon. Portlandia, 2011.Armisen, Fred; Hader, Bill; Meyers, Seth. Documentary Now!, 2015.Apatow, Judd; Dunham, Lena. Girls, 2012.Michaels, Lorne. Saturday Night Live, 1975.Robinson, Tim. I Think You Should Leave, 2019. ................
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