Laughing through the writing process...hopefully.

Everyday, we are given a new formula (two on the first day!) and asked to write a sketch using that particular structure. What I discovered is that a formula does not guarantee “funny”; It can only produce a blueprint allowing for funny. In sketch comedy, out-of-the-box thinking is required for truly successful sketches, and this is exactly what my 2e students excel at. Their ideas and concepts are never really of this world. It's a perfect match in theory.

However, the formulas that produce longer length sketches require meticulous preplanning, as in essay writing. The executive functioning skills necessary to produce all written expression- the ability to plan, initiate, organize, execute and shift ones own cognitive effort-are areas of weakness in most 2e learners. Representing ideas on paper, applying basic skills such as capitalization, punctuation and spelling, organizing, sequencing, elaborating on ideas (what is relevant, what comes first, what comes next, etc.) present challenges in task completion. Add to this mix, deficits in working memory, short-term memory, and processing speed, and you can see why written expression is a painful and frustrating process for these gifted individuals.

Sketch comedy writing provides me with the carrot to engage my students’ strong senses of humor and motivate them toward task completion. The sketch comedy writing process is well suited to scaffolding, an instructional strategy. For example, the writing task is easily broken down into beats, even smaller bits of information than paragraphs. For the visual learners, we can watch professional sketch comedy as examples of the desired outcome before they begin the task of writing, and brainstorming and collaborating on the sketch ideas and their execution will allow the students to “think aloud,” another great strength of 2e learners.

As I mentioned in the previous blog, in sketch comedy, the game or main idea, is everything. Just as in essay writing, no side trips are allowed. Each subsequent beat in a sketch must be true to the game you set up in the beginning of the sketch. Also, like in essay writing, the fourth or last beat must reiterate the game established in the first beat. There is a correlation here that might serve my 2e students well in their development of stronger writing skills.