Communication in Comedy: TSF Sketch (Final Draft)
One thing I distinctly remember from the beginning of my freshman year of college was how excited my friend was about trying out for the sketch team at the University of Florida. Her excitement only grew when she got on the team. She is not the type of person to get animated about things, so it was highly infectious. Even though UF is pretty much a rival school, it was because of her excitement that I watched an hour-long Facebook livestream of the show her first sketch was performed in. She talks about her sketch team often enough that it almost feels as though I joined it too – which made it the perfect subject for this paper.
Adriane Jones, the aforementioned friend, was more than willing to be interviewed and help out in any way that she could. Thankfully so, because her interview was probably the most helpful source I have. Researching sketch comedy is practically impossible, as there is little cited information to be discovered. Her interview pointed my research into a different and unexpected direction.
Before drifting in that new direction, it is important that we start with the basics. From what I could scrounge up, sketch comedy is a derivative of both North American vaudeville comedy and British music hall theater of the late 18th century and early 19th century. Despite cutting out most of the elements of vaudeville and music hall theater, sketch comedy kept the scripted scene comedy. It also kept the two genres’ wide variety of subject material – which, according to Daniel Kirby in his “History of Sketch Comedy” webpage, allows sketch comedy to resonate with all kinds of audiences.
A sketch comedy team, at least in Jones’s case, is group of people that work together to write these scripted comedy scenes and then perform them for an audience. A widely known example of a sketch team is the cast and writers of Saturday Night Live. Like Jones’s group, SNL writes, rehearses, and performs sketches. Before Jones joined her team and told me all she has about it, SNL was one of my first exposures to sketch comedy, along with Monty Python. The two are considered pioneers in televised sketch comedy, and they are so influential that they altered a majorly important aspect of sketch comedy. Since its creation, sketch comedy was comprised of entirely non-linear scenes and all scenes were created from scratch with nothing repeated from previous scenes (Kirby). The sketches were almost completely unrelated until Monty Python and SNL introduced recurring characters, which are a facet that I think draw people in and keep them around.
Before asking Jones any questions in relation to this paper, I searched the internet for any information on her sketch team that I could find. Back when she had first joined the team, she mentioned to me that they sometimes record sketches to upload online. That prompted me to ask her what the name of her team was while conveniently forgetting to mention that the only reason I was asking was so I could find those videos in the hopes of seeing her in one. She, probably blissfully unaware of my ulterior motives, told me that the team was called “Theater Strike Force.”
However, once I found the homepage for Theater Strike Force, I found out that while she technically is a part of Theater Strike Force, the sketch comedy team is actually and appropriately called TSF Sketch. Perusing their Wikipedia page, I navigated to the “Faculty & Staff” directory of UF’s College of the Arts, where I located the biography page for one Dr. Judith W.B. Williams.
Dr. Williams teaches acting and/or directing at UF. Early in her career there, which began in 1989, she founded Theater Strike Force (Faculty & Staff Directory). TSF has come a long way since it was created, and now includes several “home teams,” among those being TSF Sketch.
Typically, TSF is solely unscripted, improvised comedy. TSF Sketch, however, is an exception. Members of the team spend the school year writing sketches, and those sketches are typically about things like “current events, university life and societal norms” (TSF Sketch Home).
Now knowing that, I proceeded to conduct my interview over email. This fit best into our busy schedules and allowed us to avoid trying to find a time we would both be available to talk. Although this method of interviewing was arguably slower than if we had just spoken over the phone, I think it was better because it allowed her answers to be more fleshed out, like when we discussed her group’s communication outside of itself, which focuses a lot on their upcoming shows.
The shows, like practically every other type of media, are pointless without an audience. With this in mind, TSF Sketch promotes itself in places on their campus that are most frequented by students. Since having an audience is so important, members must reach a certain number of “PR points” by advertising through “flyer-ing” and by personally inviting people to the shows (Jones). Though there was no mention of what happens should a member not reach that desired number of points, there is an underlying promise of consequences that is possibly a driving force behind members actively participating in promoting the group.
This was the point when the focus of my research drifted from sketch comedy to something else. As a psychology major, that underlying promise made me remember the things I have learned so far about the effect of punishment. It was intriguing enough for me to look into more specific research conducted on punishment, especially in social situations.
Personally, from what I know about it, I would argue that punishment is generally effective despite its potential moral objections. In conducting my research, I was not looking to answer the question about whether punishment is effective, but more about what makes it effective and how it can be used more effectively.
If used in a way that is both consist and contingent, punishment can be an effective means of influence in social exchange. In her study on punishment, Linda D. Molm discovered that the most important factor in determining punishment strategies is that contingency, and that punishment appears to be effective only when used contingently.
The major argument against punishment, and why people are hesitant to implement it, is that it is believed to result in negative emotional effects, like anxiety, and the individual who is facing punishment might attempt escape or avoid it. These presumed effects are not backed up by much evidence. Richard D. Arvey and John M. Ivancevich conducted a study in which they zeroed in on the effect of punishment in organizations, in which they argued that the empirical evidence about those negative affects is, in fact, “particularly weak.”
Both studies on punishment maintain the point that the question is not especially concerned with the morality of the act itself, or whether it is all that effective. Instead, they seem to promote the idea that the real question becomes more about how punishment “[may] best be used to accomplish behavior change” (Arvey and Ivancevich). In this case, TSF’s promotion of itself could possibly be influenced by the implication of negative consequences should members not participate, and the threat of an unnamed punishment may be effective because of its contingency. This may be a contributing factor in making the flyers an effective means of communication with their audience. The implied threat of punishment for not participating in handing them out would make members more likely to hand them out and therefore allow the flyers to reach more people to hopefully draw to their performances.
Another thing that this part of my interview made me consider in regards to TSF Sketch’s communication with its audience is how effective their flyers are, and what can be done to maximize that effectiveness. Advertising ultimately increases attendance, according to a study conducted by Corinne Berneman and Marie-Josée Kasparian. This result is not exactly surprising; however, simply advertising an event is not enough to draw in the biggest crowd possible. The degree to which an audience increases for an advertised event is reliant on some other factors.
Repetition is an important one in an audience’s ability to recall. Although recall will not guarantee attendance, it is an important starting point. The number of posters or flyers per exposure also increases recall (Berneman and Kasparian), meaning that someone is more likely to remember an upcoming event if they are exposed to two flyers at one time in an area rather than just one flyers.
I am not a student at UF, and therefore I am not too familiar with what is considered to be popular hangout spots for students. After asking Jones and searching for these areas online to make sure I got the names right, I found that two of the most student-populated places are The HUB (a high-traffic bus stop with restaurants and study group rooms) and the Wayne Reitz Union. Should members of TSF Sketch hang several flyers in these areas and proceed to hand them out to people there as well, they increase the likelihood that an individual will be exposed to more than one flyer and remember the information about their upcoming show.
This repetition is not enough to get someone to attend. While the exposure certainly helps, how the flyer looks also has an impact. If it is just an uninteresting white sheet of paper with a boring font in standard black ink, it is likely not going to draw much attention. In the picture Jones sent me, the sketch team’s flyers are the exact opposite: they are colorful with bold fonts and eye-catching images, along with creative names and slightly puzzling yet comedic taglines. The flyer I saw proclaimed, “Run and tell your mother, because it’s the TSF Fall Show: ‘Mom, I’m Sorry.’”
Although it somewhat seemed like a sudden shift in the conversation, I had to ask Jones about the communication within TSF Sketch. Communication within the group is just as important as gathering an audience and communicating with that audience. One of the main ways members communicate is during their weekly meetings. In our interview, Jones mentioned that they perform a show each semester, and that those shows feature the best sketches written and usually performed by members of the team. It is in these meetings that they discuss their shows and decide what sketches they are going to perform. They also use their meetings to choose who is going to play what role and in what sketch, as well as picking what sketches to film and when. After these decisions are made, the meetings shift predominantly to rehearsing and preparing for shows, as well as filming.
Aside from those meetings, the team primarily uses a private Facebook group to share information about upcoming performances and meetings with its members. Overall, this media does well in allowing members to find out the new information while giving them the ability to post questions, comments, or concerns that can easily be responded to by other members (Jones).
I do not have access to the private Facebook group, so I asked Jones to send me screenshots of a few posts in the group. It seems to be pretty standard, not differing much from any other groups that I have seen. Most of the posts seem to be announcements about their weekly meetings, as well as announcements about performances and what days they plan on filming. On some of these posts, there are comments reaffirming times and locations, and questions about what sketches are being performed or filmed and what things they should bring for rehearsals. Members who could not make meetings asked about what they missed, and it seemed like other members took little to no time to fill them in.
My generation – that is, individuals enrolled in college or are about to be enrolled – are arguably the most active on social media. This is a good sign for TSF Sketch’s chosen mode of communication. It implies that their members would most effectively be reached through sites like Facebook. However, when I questioned her about potential problems with her team’s means of communication, Jones talked about how some members use and check Facebook more often than others. Members who do not check their private group page as often thusly have a greater chance of missing out on important information.
Though the amount of which one uses Facebook could entirely depend on the person, there may a possible trend on who is more likely to use Facebook more often, according to a study on the Facebook activity of students of Karlstad University in Sweden. It might come down to certain demographics, such as males versus females and undergraduate students versus graduate students. Alimohammad Aghazamani’s study focused on these groups as well as others and discovered some discrepancies. Through a questionnaire, he found that male students used Facebook more than females, and that undergraduate students reported more Facebook use than graduate students. If there is a female graduate student within TSF Sketch, she might be missing out on some vital stuff.
Nevertheless, the results of that study cannot be generalized. It only focused on one country and one university, and therefore did not take into account other factors that could influence one’s Facebook use. If the same study were replicated in a North American university or in an Asian high school, the results could potentially vary greatly. However, it would be unwise to completely ignore the results of this study. It does suggest that age and gender may be a determinant of an individual’s Facebook usage and it is something that should be considered.
Despite that problem, Jones contends that this way of communicating is ultimately effective, and even offered up a solution for how that problem could be easily fixed. If they could find a way to verify that each member has seen the information, then there would no longer be an issue, even if that way was to text the members that are known to go on Facebook less frequently than others.
All this information about how this UF-based sketch team communicates and the contributing factors of said communication begs the question of what kind of impact all of it has. The flyers allow TSF Sketch to reach out to their audience is a creative and memorable way, thusly letting them showcase their skills to a wider variety of people and hopefully spread some laughter. The meetings make sure all of that goes smoothly, ensuring that the team is giving the best performance they possibly can to their audience. The private Facebook group lets the team share important information amongst themselves to hopefully guarantee that they all know what is going on within the team and with their performances.
One thing I made sure to ask Jones was what she believed was the impact her team had on the school. She told me she thinks that it is something positive, because they provide free entertainment and exposure to new comedy. It is their modes of communication that make that positive effect possible, allowing TSF Sketch to spread some joy to someone who may really need it.