02 October 2007

Ken Levine's Comedy Conference Call

Ken Levine cracks me up. I'm sitting on his conference call right now and he's killing. I honestly can't believe the amount he does for aspiring writers.

Right now he's discussing a valuable comedy lesson he and partner David Isaacs learned early in their career. They'd written a series of one-act comedies in different styles, including a farce. On the opening Friday, the audience laughed uproariously throughout most of the play, but near the end just stopped. Concerned, they tried to figure out what might have been the cause but couldn't find anything. During Saturday night's performance, the crowd laughed all the way through. Ken and David decided it was a fluke.

The following Friday, it happened again. Apparently, audiences are just too tired after a full week's work. So, when they reached the point in their careers where they had enough juice to demand it, they insisted on Tuesday tapings before studio audiences. Remember that: you want a fresh audience, especially if you're showing farce.

I'll leave it to others to discuss the difficult actors Ken's worked with. I will say that he said Shelly Long was not difficult at all, but that her process was time-consuming.

4 comments:

Beckylooo said...

Oh I do so love Ken! (And I'm now somehow able to comment without that annoying "You're Not Valid" error message. Yippers!

R.A. Porter said...

Ken is *awesome*. But the commenting is cracking me up. You got around the commenting software I'm testing and into the underlying Blogger comment system! Very trick (that, of you just have Javascript turned off.)

:)

Beckylooo said...

Actually, I tried to comment on another post and couldn't find my way around the fancy/beta, so I don't think it's java. Sigh. I'm just tech savvy enough to be annoyed when it becomes clear how UNsavvy I really am.

R.A. Porter said...

Okay. Now that's just sad. I'm missing your commentary/snark on other posts.

So what is the error behavior you're seeing? Does it occur when you pull up the page, or when you try to submit?

Also (because until I can convince some crazy showrunner to hire me as a writer I'm still a software engineer) what are your...
browser and version
OS and version

I remember you commented that you were using Firefox on some version of Windows. What are the particulars?

This software company has been remarkably fast at turning bugs around, so I figured I'd see if I can't figure yours out.

One more question: do you see any other comments that might already be posted with the fancy/beta commenting software?